That's the short version; here's a longer excerpt:
If armed violence erupts the 2024 elections, quelling it could fall to the U.S. military, which may be reluctant to take arms against U.S. citizens. In that case, the fate of the nation might well be decided by a simple fact: a big subset of one of the two parties has for years been systemically arming itself for this very reason.
"I hope it's just too crazy to happen here," says Erica De Bruin, an assistant professor of government at Hamilton College, who studies coups around the world. "But it's now in the realm of the plausible"....
[T]he small newspapers in the rural, red-state areas that are the core of the Republican party's rank and file are giving voice to a simpler picture: Politics are dead; it's time to fight. "Wake up America!" reads a September opinion piece excoriating Democrats in The Gaston Gazette, based in Gastonia, N.C. "The enemy is at our gates, God willing it is not too late to turn back the rushing tide of this dark regime." The piece goes on to quote Thomas Paine's exhortation to colonists to take up arms against the British. "We are in a civil war," a letter published in September in The New Mexico Sun likewise warns Republicans, "between the traditional Americans and those who want to impose socialism in this country and thus obtain complete government control of its citizens"....
Gallup found that half of all Republicans own guns, nearly three times the rate of gun ownership as among Democrats. Gun owners are overwhelmingly male and white and are more likely to live in the rural south than anywhere else. Those demographics mesh neatly with the hard-core segment of the Republican party....
What might lead to large-scale armed threat or even violence around the 2024 elections? There may be only one narrow path to avoiding it: A comfortable, incontestable win by Trump, assuming he's the Republican candidate. Democrats might despair at the loss, but it's not likely that they will go into mass protests against what could be seen as a legitimate election win.
But if Trump loses, by any margin, and is unable to overturn the results through legal or political means, it seems likely Republicans will declare the election fraudulent. In 2020, the conviction—against all evidence—that Trump had the presidency stolen from him brought an insurrectionist mob to the U.S. Capitol. The mob was mostly unarmed, undoubtedly thanks to Washington D.C.'s strict gun-control laws....
In 2024, that sort of mob, which will have been fed for four years on false claims of a "Big Steal" and exhortations to fight back against tyranny, will likely be far, far larger. If gun-control laws are weakened by the Supreme Court, they will also likely be heavily armed. In addition to Washington, D.C., the ACLED report found that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oregon face the largest risk of armed uprisings in contested elections, followed by North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, California, and New Mexico....
Whatever the circumstances that might bring on large-scale protests from Democrats in 2024, their presence in the streets could bring out armed Republican counter-protesters bent on protecting Trump's nominal win and, in their minds, defending democracy against left-wing mobs. "It's a fair concern that If Trump called on them to come out and suppress the mobs, they might respond," says Lindsay Cohn, associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College....
If police can't or won't deal with an armed uprising, the last hope for a peaceful resolution would probably be the National Guard and military. Only the governor can call out the National Guard in a state, and only the president can deploy the military. To send in the military to quell disturbances on U.S. soil, the president must invoke the Insurrection Act, last used in 1992 by then-President George H. W. Bush to help restore order during the Los Angeles riots....
The National Guard or military would almost certainly prevail in shutting down the worst of the violence and protecting the government. But two key questions arise: Would military leadership accept Biden's orders to deploy against an armed uprising? And if it did, would the rank and file follow their commanders' orders to take up arms against fellow Americans whose motivations might resonate with many of their own?...
As for the possibility that the Guard or military rank and file might refuse to follow orders to take up arms against armed Trump supporters, the Naval War College's Cohn deems it unlikely. "There isn't a ton of evidence that the rank and file are solidly behind Trump," she says. "But whatever their beliefs, they're highly professional. No more than a tiny percentage would refuse."
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