Not advocating, and I doubt I'd be one of them holding a pitchfork, but it is something to keep in mind.
Assuming the revolting army was full of tech geeks, the best we could hope for is a drone/robotic army that uses technology. Because jocks most of us are not. LOL.
Although I doubt it'd reach the point of massive insurrection. That would require a total loss of trust in the government, and I think we're still far from that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/29/ameri...
So I readily read one in three households, as strictly more than one in three persons - have access to guns?
That's a bad reading. Even if everyone in a household with a gun owner have access to guns, that would mean 33% of households implies exactly 33% of people if gun ownership is distributed among households with no bias by household size. It doesn't imply more than 33% of people unless gun owning households are larger than non-gun-owning households.
There are many non-gun owners that are without a doubt for owning guns.
What part of calling them a vocal minority seems inaccurate?
33% on a binary trait (one either does or does not own at least one gun) is clearly a minority.
Merely owning guns is different than possessing the physical ability and training in weapons and tactics to use them effectively, especially versus military or paramilitary forces (National Guard and Border Patrol is a much more likely initial pro-government force than police). Not only are they equipped and trained with the same weapons civilians may have, they also have automatic weapons, nightvision, grenades, armored vehicles, helicopters, tear gas, sonic weapons, fire trucks, and a lot more.
The fact is that the select few protect themselves with rolls of the sons and daughters of the masses. Sure, plenty of them will turn their weapons on their fellow countrymen for a paycheck, but how many? And for how long?
And especially once those bullets start flying, how useful is the money being paid to those guards? How long before they have all the money they could ever want and no one will sell them food?
In our hyper-connected world, we lose people jobs when they crack a racist joke on twitter. How hard will it be to find the 1%'s executioners?
For example, I don’t know what food you’re talking about because in my wild fantasy scenario, all of the freeways have been destroyed and Walmarts and grocery stores are empty. Mass starvation, plague, panic, electricity is off, no communication systems work other than the military. They have seized anything useful. They have tanks etc, which helps a lot. As far as ‘who will sell them food’... you’re talking about a highly armed military force fighting a civil war? Do you think people are going shopping at Kroger with the other side or something? This isn’t the French Revolution. This is 80 years after millions of people died in gas chambers in Europe, right? The next major wars are not going to be very friendly.
Sure, Shock and Awe was successful, but it was nothing more than a raid. The US Army did not conquer Iraq, at least on the medium term. They barely control most of the territory.
Its not a scenario that I really want to think about since its so brutal. But it can happen, and the war is likely to be a prolonged battle.
Not to mention, the unrest in the Motherland will let other rogue forces run amok internationally as they jostle for supremacy over each other. I can't see any of that ending well.
If the govt or millitary hold so much tech that you end up in a hunger game scenario, and the population is oppressed (but unlike hunger games, the oppression comes in the form of feeble food and entertainment - ala, bread and circus).
The people feel comfortable enough to not want to revolt. Yet, ignores the minority that do get harsher treatment, because doing so puts their own lively hood in jeopardy.
I think though that far beyond contemplating who is shooting at who with what, the more interesting question is what does victory look like for the 1%? Just shoot everyone who complains until there's nothing but peaceful staff left?
If you're talking an actual war of attrition between the classes in the US, you'd be crazy to bet on the rich. It's not even a question of "if" they can win, their win condition DOES NOT EXIST and cannot exist. The more disgruntled people who are killed, the more people become disgruntled, until you have the entirety of the damn country saying "wait a minute, why am I shooting my fellow citizens because Mr. Bezos wants a 10th house?"
If this gets to a place of violence, and if the Rich of today allow it to get to that place, they have assured their own destruction, it's simply a matter of time. The best thing they could be doing right now is supporting measures to help out the common people, if for no other reason than their money cannot stop the torches.
Edit: I'm rambling a bit here but I guess my counterpoint basically boils down to: let's assume that the Rich get full control of the US Military and it's assets to end civil insurrection and restore economic order. How do they do it? What orders do they give? Where do they send the missiles to dismantle the resistance? Which neighborhoods get power cut? Who gets banned from twitter? And how does it end?
I'm just not seeing a way that such a conflict would end where Amazon (or anyone else) could simply resume business as usual.
Any conflict where the U.S. disintegrates will likely spread worldwide, too, as other nations take advantage of the power vacuum to press their own claims. So emigration is unlikely to be a solution for people who wish to remain neutral.
The endgame for the 1% is likely to become lords or petty kings of little feudal domains. They may offer to provide security services to their employees in exchange for economic service. They wouldn't be global titans of industry, but they'd be heads of their little fiefdoms. The smart ones will avoid major military action, instead only clearing the local area around their corporate offices of populist insurgents. If the insurgents want to fight other insurgent groups, that's their business; they can all kill each other off.
Endgame for the 1% is being in a position to gain the spoils of war and to take less damage than your competition.
Private security forces and tech/AI are wildcards - we haven't had anything like the former since feudal mercenary days, and we haven't had anything like the latter ever - but could also form the basis for power centers.
That US military is also neither attacking its own citizens it has filial and friendly ties with, nor attacking people who look and talk like it.
Modern armor and missiles don't accomplish much when the enemies main goal is to just live as they want to (instead of conquer territory or resources).
No sane country would lend us money to wage war on our own people/economic infrastructure.
And mass insurrection would disrupt the supply chain. Nothing is warehoused these days, so the country would fall apart.
Maybe I'm a pessimist. Maybe I should start digging my shelter.
On a more serious note, a population is only peacefully policed at the enjoyment of the people. The critical mass of insurrection beyond which a population can no longer be policed is low. In my lifetime I have seen riots in LA, Baltimore, and Ferguson, to name just three. And those were of minority populations. If the entitled "obese" hegemonic population were part of the insurrection, it might be more difficult to put them down.
Basically troll the party in red states, some might actually get elected on a platform similar to Bernie but tweaked to appeal to right wingers, and then we can work from left/right to pull the masses to a center that's more progressive less corporatist.
I find it difficult to imagine an uprising against the 1% in America any time soon, but if it did happen I can absolutely imagine the police siding against the 1%.
I think the chance of the police or military siding against the 1% is incredibly small.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/22485.m...
Successful uprisings by the masses against the elites almost always involve substantial fractions of the military, police, and other security services defecting, either abandoning their gear or taking it with them and turning it against the elites.
Until we get robots replacing guys with guns, that's going to be a recurring failure mode for narrow elite rule.
Disease, war, some other ecological disaster... a divided and very unequal nation cannot respond to these stresses. This is what ultimately balances things, it's a shame that so many many lives will have to be destroyed in the future because we are too timid to fix the problem now.