Will a fully armed civilian population defeat a modern, mechanized army with air support? No, but it might make invaders think twice about the costs of an invasion and occupation — or at least that’s what Ukraine’s parliament hopes. A bill granting universal permission for all Ukrainians to carry firearms passed its first reading today and is likely to get adopted soon, assuming the parliament exists long enough:

Ukraine’s parliament on Wednesday voted to approve in the first reading a draft law which gives permission to Ukrainians to carry firearms and act in self-defence.

“The adoption of this law is fully in the interests of the state and society,” the authors of the draft law said in a note, adding that the law was needed due to “existing threats and dangers for the citizens of Ukraine.”

That’s what is more formally known as “full mobilization.” This might only be a formal acknowledgment of a fait accompli, however. Ukrainians haven’t been waiting for gun-control laws to get repealed to arm themselves in preparation for a bloody invasion by Russia:

Newsy spoke with a few Ukrainians who are buying their first gun in order to protect themselves, their families and their country.

Twenty-year-old law student Maria Skoropad is getting her first gun for her and her family. She’s also training to fire it.

“We decided that we have to learn how to use the weapons before buying it because we don’t want to harm ourselves,” she said.

One young person after the next is rotating through for training at a gun store and shooting range in Lviv.

“We understand that we have to take care of ourselves,” Skoropad continued. “And if somebody will come to our homes … We have to know how to rescue our families ourselves.”

After noting these developments, Cam Edwards wrote about the need for personal arms not just in times of crisis but also to avoid them:

As I said on today’s show, I believe that our right to keep and bear arms has not only served as a check on foreign aggression, but as a deterrent to any home-grown tyrants here on American soil as well. As James Madison so aptly put it in Federalist 46, Americans possess the “advantage of being armed”, unlike almost every other nation on earth, and our right to keep and bear arms, coupled with the existence of political subdivisions that can serve as a check on an out-of-control federal government, “forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”

Our right to keep and bear arms isn’t an anachronism. It’s just as important today as it was in 1776 or 1791. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just listen to the voices of those flocking to gun ranges in Lviv, or those fighting back against a military dictatorship that slaughters unarmed civilians in Myanmar. They’re not asking for more gun control laws. They’re simply looking for a way to fight for their lives, their nation, their freedom, and their human right of self-defense.

In that sense, this could potentially unfold as a kind of real-world Red Dawn, a film that offered a highly implausible foreign invasion of the US as a kind of patriotic cultural rally point. That scenario has always been far more plausible in eastern Europe and on Russia’s frontier. Gun-control laws in those places made even less sense than they do here, perhaps especially after the last thirteen-plus years after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Georgia, and then the last eight of his occupation of eastern Ukraine. Maybe this will be a Червона зоря (Red Dawn) moment for Ukraine.

Still, this full mobilization of the civilian population carries some risks, too. It will make it harder to hold Russia accountable for civilian deaths, as Putin will use any widespread partisan resistance to justify atrocities. (Of course, Putin likes to invent such pretexts anyway, as his speech this week proved.) If a Russian invasion pushes back Ukraine’s military toward population centers, the risks of friendly-fire casualties in both directions will rise sharply thanks to impossible coordination requirements as those forces overlap.

However, those risks get outweighed by the realities of life under Russian occupation, realities that Ukrainians know only too well. Besides the Holodomor,  Soviet occupation stripped their country of its assets for Moscow’s benefits, and then left them with the legacy of Chernobyl as a souvenir. Death may well be preferable, at least to those with living memories of those days. If they make that the choice for Russian soldiers moving across the borders and partitions as well, perhaps that may eventually undermine Putin’s imperial ambitions. Or at least force some of his oligarch supporter to rethink them once the body bags start rolling into Moscow.