Republicans: "We'd win a 2nd civil war, we have all the guns!"
Bitch, do you think your civilian small-arms could stand against the full military might of the federal government!? Not even saying it's a good thing...
If you think Texans can't mount an insurgency that would turn extraordinarily bloody for both sides, you're crazy. A significant part of the military would switch sides too, and we'd have a full blown civil war on our hands.
"A significant part of the military would switch sides too" So you think a large portion of the military would casually commit treason? The Military is built on following orders even when you don't like them. Especially when you don't like them. A bunch of hics LARPing as guerrilla fighters on American soil are not going to stand very long, at all. The red hats are a good target from 30,000 feet.
Living in Virginia and seeing bumper stickers talking about "The Biden Crime family" and other nutjob bullshit, yes. They don't really hide their retardation. In fact, they go out of their way to advertise it.
They wouldn't stand a chance. They're power grid is so brittle. The US military would destroy it probably within minutes of an actual war being started. The people who can't stand the heat or the cold (depending on the time of year) would turn on them so quickly.
Just like the south in the civil war, they don't have the infrastructure for the logistics needed to fight a war.
On their own turf the USA has all the maps of everything including of what's underground, they already have records of who are the potential insurrectionists, where they live, what they drive, who their families are and they also have the support of a huge part of the population.
Oh and good luck to the guys who own machine guns and hunting rifles when facing drones flying high enough that you can't see them with your naked eye.
It wouldn't happen like that. We would have an insurgency and lots of terrorist attacks. You would have towns and areas that are under insurgent control, with reprisal killings at night. Shit like that. I can't tell you to take it seriously, but you ought to at least consider how it would actually look if it happened.
Well even if they lose, I'm sure that won't be much comfort to the good people they kill along the way. I just don't think we should be glib at the thought of open civil conflict. Looking at it this way convinced me that I don't want to be without the means to defend myself and my loved ones in the event our "cold" civil war suddenly becomes "hot".
It really depends on what would be happening in the military and intelligence services.
I don't think people really understand just how much a civil conflict would be a war of information as opposed to a war of arms.
If things got bad enough domestically that laws like the Patriot Act were expanded and agencies that haven't been supposed to operate domestically suddenly could, and those agencies were still 100% under government control, you'd have vans (or simply drones) taking out domestic terrorists in the middle of the night right before the day they were supposed to organize to kill and terrorize their neighbors.
The US could become an almost unthinkable police state under the control of a government like China's or if we had a Stalin-esque administration.
This is the part that Y'all Queda don't fully grasp. They aren't hiding out in caves in Afghanistan or air gapped in Pakistan. The only thing keeping them safe from the monsters under their bed that they largely don't realize are there is the very government they think would be such a bright idea to try to overthrow. And if that government saw them as enough of an existential threat to unleash the monsters on them, well, they'd have quickly succeeded in overthrowing the US government in a sense, but wouldn't be around to see it.