I want to know how easy it is to overthrow a government because I'm getting mixed messages here

I just want like a consistent standard

President Joe Biden this week went off on one of his weirdest and most favorite stemwinders, claiming that American citizens who think they have hope of defending themselves from a potentially oppressive government better think again: “If you need to worry about taking on the federal government, you need some F-15s,” he said. “You don't need an AR-15.” He has said this before. This is a pretty disturbing remark from a chief executive, implying as it does both a potentially burgeoning federal tyranny and the willingness of federal soldiers to use fire-and-forget-its against American citizens. If he’s trying to calm us down it’s not working.

Perhaps more importantly, there seems to be a bit of a double standard at work here. The same people who claim that an armed U.S. citizenry would be functionally useless against the federal government are also the ones who seem to think it’s actually extremely easy to overthrow the federal government. Joe Biden himself, for example, has claimed that during the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, the United States was subject to a “brutal attack,” that the country was faced with “the gravest of threats,” and that “the rule of law” itself was at risk. The riot “place[d] a dagger at the throat of our democracy,” he has implied, with the overthrow of the government only narrowly averted on that fateful day.

Well this is all of course very silly. The Capitol riot was just that—a riot. It was carried out by an inchoate, unarmed mob of out-of-shape, low-information people who honestly weren’t even themselves sure what they were angry about. Many of them were actually let into the U.S. Capitol; they wandered around for a bit, some of them tussled with police, one of them got shot and died, the rest were easily dispersed and/or arrested, it was all over in a few hours. It was deeply idiotic and incoherent and embarrassing, but to describe it as “the gravest of threats” is really quite laughable.

Still, just for curiosity’s sake, I’d really just like to know which of these visions of armed rebellion is the more accurate—the one where you can’t rebel against a tyrannical government unless you have an ample supply of F-22s and ASMs, or the one where you can nearly overthrow the U.S. government with nothing more than a broken flag pole and a can of bear mace. If it’s the former than clearly the Jan. 6 riot was never even remotely the “grave threat” we’ve been told it was; if it’s the latter then it’s actually way easier to insurrect this country than anyone ever thought possible. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they nail this down for us!