The most likely places the shooting would start If a civil war started in the US

According to- pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: The Civil War was fought in over 10,000 places and was the bloodiest war in the history of the United States. Two percent of the population at the time (approximately 620,000) died during the conflict (1). More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other wars combined. As hard as it is to believe, these numbers may actually be an underestimate of the death toll, given that much of the data regarding deaths of Confederate soldiers was destroyed when Richmond burned on April 2, 1865. More recent estimates based on comparative census data put the figure closer to 752,000 (2). Countless other soldiers were left disabled. The year after the war ended, the state of Mississippi spent 20% of its annual budget on artificial limbs for its veterans (3).

There are factions in the world today that are interested in achieving world supremacy. Various powers are busy figuring out how to dominate and destroy other world powers they clearly have no interest in securing peace for the world. Many nations are hiding nuclear arsenals, while others, such as Iran, are developing nuclear weapons while endeavoring to keep their plans secret from the other nations of the world.

If the United States has “another civil war” it won’t look like North and South clashing on the fields of Manassas. Those days are long gone and the differences that divide us as a nation are not broken out along clean geographic lines like they were in the 1860s.

Here’s a map of the United States in 1858. The difference between the “states where it was legal to own people” and “states that seceded from the Union” is pretty minimal. No, not everyone who lived in Virginia (for example) agreed with the Southern cause: that’s where we get that “brother against brother” cliche. But support for secession was very, very high in the slave states.

You might think that we could draw similar lines today:

But this map obscures a lot of complexity because it hides the deep divisions within the states. If we break it out at the county rather than state level that becomes both clearer and more confusing:

Here we’re showing the 2020 Presidential winner at the county level. Looking at this map you’d be forgiven for wondering how President Biden ever thought he had a shot.

But if we graph by margin of victory it’s less clear cut:

Still, it does seem like you could draw some lines between Red-Land and Blue-Land there. But everything is all muddy and mixed up.

The problem is that any map that shades LAND as if it VOTES is trading in a falsehood. What we really need to understand the physical geography of the United States in a map with one dot per vote: a map that faithfully represents population density and how those populations vote.

The above map does just that, but it’s not the best resolution.

The first thing that’s clear from this map is that, in any future American civil war, there are no borders to defend or frontiers to guard. Americans are all mixed together. What we have is an urban/rural divide, not a North/South or East/West divide. But this means that most Americans live near or around other Americans who disagree with them. While we tend to think of cities as the huge urban hives, even famously-liberal Chicago has a fair number of red dots

Likewise, even Amarillo, Texas has a cluster of blue-votes in its downtown area

But what that means for the United States is that a civil war would probably look a lot more like a series of riots and lynchings than anything else. There would be no glorious last stand by the Target in Dothan, Alabama. Instead, there would be explosions of violence in which simmering hatreds boil over and communities descend into butchery and barbarism. Alternatively, a slow burn is also possible in which like-minded radicals carry out bombings, arson, and other terror attacks to “politically cleanse” their region of “undesirables.”

So where would the shooting start? Everywhere. There are no battle lines here. An American Civil War would be the worst kind of fighting imaginable. House to house, street by street, neighbors killing neighbors in the name of whatever vicious, violent, and xenophobic ideology they subscribe to.

Some imagine that it would be an action movie. Far from it; it would be a horror show.