People need to demand change (they are)
and there need to be real avenues for change (questionable).
The parent is likely echoing JFK: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Here are some things that have made peaceful revolution seem impossible:
- No ballot items for surveillance disclosures
- Loss of Udall, one of the only people representing the people on this issue in any real way in the Senate Intelligence Panel and in the legislative body
- Candidate Obama's campaign promises significantly divergent from President Obama's actions on civil liberties (and he was a constitutional law scholar, exactly what you think we would have needed)
- Habeas Corpus still suspended in America. The Constitution is a peace time document, but America is in perpetual war - in fact it is in wars that have no clear ending conditions (Terrorism and the threat of Terrorism will never end; the same is true of drugs)
- Political movements and protest groups responding to the surveillance state disrupted by federal agents
- Word games played with 'Congress was briefed' regarding Executive Branch activity, FISA courts proven to be rubber stamps, CIA willing to hack legislatures auditing them - intelligence arms seem to have escaped checks and balances.
- Hot button protests are being corralled away from protest zones where they are highly visible, either by police cages or by 'free speech zones' which are miles away, off the map and require you to register your intent to express free speech and get confirmation from the state
- Fusion Centers merging federal anti-terror tools with local law enforcement - ending non-surveilled local grass roots efforts to organize actions to express non-condoned political ideas
- Journalists and media outlets under routine surveillance and tap-and-trace (like the AP scandal this administration) to chill confidential informants that may bring stories from Washington to the news (and thus the people)
- The US government cuts access to press releases and interviews for those media outlets that don't 'play nice' with USG narratives or delay/kill/censor select stories (meta point: there's a reason journalism is called the Fourth Estate of American Politics)
- Every modern administrations feel it is reasonable to use their access to power to harass and sabotage political rivals (as is commonly done with the IRS)
- Political debates purposefully exclude third party candidates, appearing in front of the public and challenging 'enshired parties'
- Gilens and Page study out of Princeton and Cornell show high correlation between passed legislature and the demands of rich elite interests but poor correlation with national consensus
- The approval ("I feel represented") rating of the Congress is around 7% and the president's approval rating is around 50%
- The American people made it explicitly and extremely clear they were not interested in many things (such as military engagement in Syria) but could only manage to delay military action with a >75% national consensus on the issue for a couple of months
- The government lied repeatedly about the contents of the Snowden documents and passed faux legislation and even proposed bills to expand NSA authority as a response to public outcry
It would be easy to continue adding to the list. There are many reasons why it is hard to feel that peaceful revolution is possible.
So the parent feels, maybe, and maybe he said it a bit flippantly, that violent revolution is inevitable.