There is no saying you can't go on the midnight justice brigade in the city without bringing a rifle, but leaving it up to someone else to do the arsenal work is just plain weak. You don't need a rifle to be the tough guy on the cell block of any major prison either, but then, you don't bust that prison open and get your people out without confronting the issue of those in towers with the rifles, and those who will be responding quickly as you attempt to consolidate control of any area.
It also has to do with consolidating zones of control in day to day operations. If an oppressor knows that all they have to do is escalate the conflict to a level where they know for certain they are the dominant force and winning is an eventuality, then you can't negotiate with them. You might be able to plead for mercy, or a little bump up in their power structure, but you can't throw them out of any town or village.
One of my grandfathers liberated several French towns from what was at the time, one of the most powerful armies on the planet. His unit had to move fast and light due to some of their other mission priorities. Due to the nature of their job, they were already having to move in advance of allied forces as a reconnaissance element, but had been too far forward of allied lines to get resupply from the rear. Advance units, even those they were expected to report to, were rejecting request for supply or chow. At one point, they were ordered away from a black tanker unit at gunpoint when they went in for chow shortly after the Battle of the Bulge and the push into the border areas with Germany began.
Their only chance for resupply was from caches in enemy held areas, and at that, their force was too small to surround and capture any significant enemy force without the risk of taking losses from handling prisoners, or having to deal with feeding and transporting prisoners. Likewise, if they trapped an enemy force with no choice but to fight to the death, then it would lead to a protracted battle with losses, and his group was constantly short on military rations due to the limited carrying capacity of their jeeps. They could only move around with a small number of vehicles in order not to be targeted by artillery from either side.
The trick then was to find a weak to middling enemy force that was sitting in proximity to supplies that force could not carry away in a hasty evacuation. So how to force the small enemy garrisons to evacuate?
He figured out the German army was fairly highly disciplined, trained, and extremely predictable. They also apparently held their French sympathizers in fairly high regard and not only respected their property, but worked together with them in making them "the top of the heap" in any French village. The collaborators lived by extorting goods and services from the local population under the threat of calling the Gestapo as backup if things did not go their way. They often collected rewards for turning in resistance operatives, Jews, and downed allied aircrew members. In any given French village then, was at least one house, or group of houses, usually near a police station or garrison unit housed in a local hotel which held the loot collected by the collaborators and the gestapo, along with the best food the area had to offer, usually held in the collaborator house and served to the axis officers on a regular basis as their enlisted troops used and abused the hotel as a barracks and chow hall.
What he figured out was that if he could force a hasty Nazi evacuation, not only did the German troops pull out, but all of the higher level French sympathizers went with them in order to avoid retribution at the hands of the French resistance who were constantly lurking in the shadows, but only occasionally stepped up to murder a collaborator, German straggler, wire repairman or messenger. Even allied troops were warned to be wary of the "resistance" since resistance units were savvy to robbing each other for "supplies" and it never was clear exactly how entitled they felt to obtaining allied force property if given the opportunity. The resistance groups sold information to the allies, for payment, would sometimes scout enemy positions, (for payment) and take some risks, but they were not a fighting resource very often because they usually lacked weapons and ammunition, and were not often trusted in the allied rear enough to just be handed weapons and ammunition and integrated into the allied forces. Five years of betrayal and not being able to trust anyone, factional infighting and harsh living conditions made the resistance fighters on average dishonest, risk adverse, and overly cautious around any authority. Even if given rifles and ammunition, they were often ill-trained, malnourished, sick and gained a reputation for incompetence in battle, but extreme cruelty to axis prisoners. A big part of the allied strategy was to treat axis prisoners well enough to encourage surrender without fighting. In the time period after the Malmady massacre, most US units indulged in the summary execution of SS prisoners. They could not afford to let French civilians or resistance personnel the opportunity to be armed and alone with German prisoners. If word of prisoner executions got out, more Germans would be getting hard core and fighting to the death, and the allied strategy for postwar Europe involved infusing a number of ani-Communist Germans back into the population after a relatively comfortable stay in prison camps in the USA and UK. They got away with executing SS prisoners or simply refusing SS surrender (which was unlikely to begin with) because the SS had been increasingly repressive even inside Germany, so it was easier for people to distance themselves from involvement with the SS or what happened to them.
We would also note that the SS were almost never used for garrison duty. They were either a strike force, special response force in Nazi held rear areas for planned repression operations or undergoing extra training. Nobody dared taking them on without having their shit together.
There was no record of any occupied town self-liberating without a conventional military or paramilitary force doing the heavy work without rifles. Acts of vandalism and sabotage did help allied forces, but often led to reprisals, and the Gestapo often had particularly high quality local intelligence assets under their control. If someone broke windows at night at the German garrison, the perpetrator's family was lined up in the town square the next morning. Even if not immediately shot, they were publicly humiliated as the collaborators would loot their belongings, maybe even burn their house. People in the rest of the town would be invited to throw rocks at them, spit on them, and make the event a public statement against the resistance.
Everyone knew the Germans were going to be on the losing side of the war, but the question was whether or not they could negotiate a long term cease fire by stopping the allied advance at the German border. They figured any such peace agreement would be a brokered truce with limitations on the size of the German army, and therefore most of the German soldiers would be allowed to leave the military. All of the German officers had accumulated loot and personal wealth during the war and for the most part, looked forward to enjoying an early retirement.
What grandpa, then a young corporal, was able to accomplish on his trips to the rear areas among the allied forces was hand pick men who would be guaranteed to shoot to kill, maybe not the very best marksmen or strongest troops, but they had to be willing to shoot to kill. Due to his rank, he was limited to five men under his command. While there was no direct military career incentive to joining up with him, when he went to the rear areas, he made sure to very publicly show off his war loot. His sidearm was an officer's Luger worn in an officer's holster, he carried a Beretta 38a submachinegun. His take on the 9mm submachineguns was they were the absolute best to carry around and show off in friendly rear areas, with the Beretta being particularly accurate and good for showing off and impressing people with. "Like a warm reminder of home and shooting with a nice little accurate .22". He would deliver various war trophies to the highest ranking officers he could find, items like briefcases full of documents, radio ciphers, and in one case, he gave his superiors one of two cases of German Army payroll money that he had found in a hastily abandoned train station.
The primary weapons for the hand picked crew of five (6 men total) were actually the Garands, plus everything else for making noise. The jeeps had machine-gun mounts, but they were not a primary weapon, more like an emergency response weapon to drive enemies away from a place where they were parked and give the men time to get to their rifles and set up an ambush if the enemy came back. His take on the MGs "they are really good for making a whole lot of noise and scaring people, especially if you get close and do it by surprise, but if you need to kill someone, use a good rifle".
The plan for taking the average French town was to move a full day ahead of the main allied forces, preferably two days, and in one case, he made it for two weeks without going to the rear. The Germans always had what they thought was fairly good intel on the locations of the forces in the area, but french locals had decent intel on the German forces. His group would start in late morning, grab a French peasant, elect him to be the local Maqis operative, share some food and maybe cash, and then pry them for info on the German garrison. They would then tell the French informant that the allied forces were immediately behind them and liberation was near. If a recon could be accomplished without paying the informant, that was the preferred action, since they were never sure if the French informant would catch on to the fact that it was only a six man unit that showed up, and allied forces were actually nowhere near then flip and tell the Germans what was going on. As it was, his squad usually spent the night in a nice comfortable house or hotel and had lost tolerance for sleeping in foxholes since some particularly bad times during the Battle of the Bulge.
The game plan; make some noise and every man in the group make a single confirmed kill. If an enemy were wounded, so much the better, so there were no double tap executions. A hit was a "kill" for their purposes. They parked, left one man with each vehicle keeping watch and ready to jump to the machinegun while getting a late lunch prepared. The attack group moved in on foot, rotating to different positions and taking their shots, then moving to other positions, taking shots until they confirmed someone on the enemy side actually went down and stayed down. Once they saw enemy medics attend to someone wounded or drag a body away, they called it confirmed and left to hit the town from a slightly different direction.
He figured out that at first, a platoon sized unit would evacuate once they had taken six casualties, but later in the war, a company sized unit would evacuate once they had taken six casualties. The German commander needed around an hour to assess the situation, call back to his command, and confirm permission to evacuate. The evacuation would take anywhere from a half our to three hours depending on the efficiency of the unit, but as things moved ahead, some units were already packed up to evacuate or pursue, depending on the size of the allied force. The more hasty the evacuation, the better the loot, but if pressure were kept up too hard, the enemy unit would consider retreat to be fruitless and hunker down to fight to the death rather than hightail it out of there just to get shot in their backsides. The Germans were also notorious for laying mines and ambushes as they evacuated, so pursuit was only done by tanker units, quite often to their own demise. So the lesson "don't trap him, don't cut off his communications, don't pursue him, just kill a few, back off, let them figure out to withdraw", but he key to making the enemy withdraw like that was to have riflemen with a willingness to kill and accomplish the tasks at hand.
His group then entered the town took up residence in the nicest collaborator house /officer quarters they could find, and made a deal with the newly elected resistance leaders to go scout for the incoming allied force. They tended to stay away from the hotel/garrison due to the frequency of boobytraps but would try to find a communications/command room for intel material, but that would all be taken back to the collaborator house. If the Germans were to try and retake the town, they tended to hit the hotels and police stations first. The Maquis were allowed to occupy themselves with taking the abandoned gestapo and police buildings. It was assumed that they would obtain pistols and possibly confiscated weapons held in some areas around police stations, but those were not considered militarily significant. Civilian weapons also had little or no war trophy status for those occasions when status was important among peer troops, especially for a unit led by a corporal that needed proof of their tales involving taking down company sized enemy units. Anybody could talk the talk, but punctuating the story with the enemy officer's sidearm was the important element.
Even then, a "victory" would be short lived if there were not an overwhelming conventional force due to arrive in a few days.
Close range weapons are defensive in nature, and that's it. Yes you can conduct raids and ambushes with lesser weapons, but none of that makes an enemy decide to withdraw from an area and then not attempt to retake it.
In the survivalist sense, your primary weapon is going to be a good handgun mainly because your primary day to day activities are not particularly tactical. In military/militia terms, that is still "a civilian with a pistol".
Shotguns are really effective for short range, and for survival situations involving animals, but again, not military significant. I know you can push the edge of that with certain specific models like the Saiga, but then lawmakers tend to shut that down when they can also.
