Are we, as a people, really going to fight each other on the beaches, in the fields, and in the streets? Shall we really fight in the hills, where there is no air conditioning? In the forests, without refrigerators? Do we hate each other enough to eat hardtack? To undergo battlefield surgeries? Who knows about foraging anymore? Can you start a fire with nothing but sticks? (And there’s no YouTube tutorial—they’d knock down the cell towers.) In the last two years, large swaths of the country declared their lungs too weak to breathe through a cotton cloth, while others insisted it was deadly dangerous to take an open-air walk on a beach without that same cloth.

Gun control advocates like to note that fantasies about fending off tyranny with our private arsenals are unrealistic because the U.S. military is so well armed, to which gun rights activists respond by pointing at places like Afghanistan, where insurgents can frustrate that same military for decades with small arms and guerrilla tactics. And that’s true, but how many of us can do what those insurgents do? We don’t have traditional farming and survival skills. We can’t live in caves. We had a multi-month national discourse about toilet paper shortages.

If political violence becomes a regular feature of American life, then, my suspicion is it will be less pitched battles and more The Troubles (where Protestants and Catholics battled in typically low-intensity urban warfare in Northern Ireland for decades), crossed with Waco (where a religious seperatist group fought federal law enforcement, with tragic results), with Twitter hell layered on top. More likely than a second civil war resembling the first would be intermittent spasms of violence around which, as the journalist Aris Roussinos put it, our “‘normal life’ continu[es] much the same as usual, except everyone [is] more fearful and depressed,” and the feds use escalatory violence to retain control, while the inflammatory pundit class does a steady business.