There are more of us than there are rioters or government troops. Average people are orderly if the government supports their goals, not so much if it doesn’t.
We’re a 90 million strong militia... If we are pushed to it...
... and they’re pushin’...
This is why we should be extremely vigilant about prohibiting the military from developing autonomous ground fighting systems, since it will be game over for us once this happens ....
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
What this article fails to grasp is that the people that know how to drive the death machines are on our side