Do you actually object to countries having standing armies with ranged area weaponry?

This isn't what the article is talking about at all. It never says don't build military technology. It says don't build things like a database of who in the country is and isn't gay and what religion everyone practices, for fear a future bigoted administration might use it to target those people. If your government is turning howitzers on you, that's less a police state and more a civil war.

I don't know what you do against that, but it's a different situation. There is precedent in the US with the Army being used to round up and forcibly displace native populations, but that really seems to be the kind of thing that requires a political solution, not prevention of any possibility. If we didn't have an Army at all, then secession would have succeeded, there would still be chattel slavery, and one of the hostile European colonial powers likely would have simply conquered the west itself and killed all the natives anyway.