Why do rightists personify the state or government?
Organisations don’t feel fear - it’s the same as with a business, which likewise doesn’t “feel fear” as an entity. A business owner might feel fear, employees might feel their own fears and the reasons for these individual fears might even overlap, but they aren’t the same fear.
A cop doesn’t carry an arsenal because they’re generally “just scared/cowards”, they do it because the more developed West have elected for an intended monopoly on violence and therefore created jobs for people to put themselves in situations where this monopoly is being challenged so the rest of us don’t have to. The success of this decision by the West is obvious with (relatively) so few situations requiring cops to step in. A cop doesn’t try to instigate such situations, but even only reacting to them as a job involves a much higher probability of coming across one, which is going to be scary regardless of what you bring to defend yourself. That requires bravery. Going into the vast majority of situations where this monopoly isn’t being challenged with an arsenal - that’s cowardly. You’re overwhelmingly unlikely to need it on average, and in the unlikely event that you do, there are numerous services whether public (e.g. police/courts) or private (e.g. insurance) that can mitigate the consequences in the overwhelming majority of situations where you would otherwise need a gun. Situations where you’re likely to need a gun only flourish in spite of all of these services when cowardice has proliferated beyond a certain threshold such that it becomes malignant. And that’s the fault of civilians, not governments. It’s the fault of people like “Thanathots” who are stupid enough to think that they’re being clever to have the upper hand with tools of violence, regardless of most developed countries (of whom such people are usually ignorant) showing there’s really no need.
A government has to be a dictatorship for this “fear” argument to hold the slightest bit of water, because whoever the leader is, “is” the government. But anyone who thinks the president has anything close to absolute power is completely deluded.