Jul 21, 2022 17:00:00

Most Americans have a feeling that the outbreak of civil war is near, and nearly 80% say 'violence is OK' at the end of the century.

Violence in American society in recent years, such as the

Black Lives Matter movement, where protests against racism turned into a large-scale riot, and the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol , which is also described as an attempted coup d'etat. The division casts a dark shadow. A pre-reviewed treatise published on July 19, 2022, found that the majority of Americans expected a 'second civil war to occur in the near future.'

Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence: First Report from a Nationwide Population-Representative Survey | medRxiv
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.15.22277693v1

Half of Americans anticipate a US civil war soon, survey finds | Science | AAAS
https://www.science.org/content/article/half-of-americans-anticipate-a-us-civil-war-soon-survey-finds

In the United States, gun deaths increased by 43% between 2010 and 2020, and gun sales surged during the pandemic of the new coronavirus infection. To analyze how these trends relate to anxiety among citizens, a research team led by Galen Wintmute, an emergency doctor and researcher of gun crime at the University of California, Davis, is an American. We conducted a survey asking for their thoughts on political violence and democracy.

The survey included 8620 men and women enrolled in the

Ipsos Knowledge Panel , an online panel in the United States, of which 50.6% were women and the average age was 48.4 years.

When the research team aggregated the results of the survey, about two-thirds of the respondents, 67.2%, said they 'feel a serious threat to democracy' and 'have a strong leader for the United States.' Is more important than democracy. ”“ In the United States, genuine whites are being replaced by immigrants. ”More than 40% of the respondents said.

Almost half of the respondents, 50.1%, agreed with the question, 'A civil war will occur in the United States in the next few years.' 'The fact that half of the people are expecting a civil war just makes me chill,' said Wint Mute.

The study also reveals that American society is tolerating guns and violence. Of the 8620 respondents, 6768 believe that 'in some cases violence is justified to achieve a particular political objective,' of which 12.2% are 'due to threats and intimidation,' 10.4%. 'To hurt people' and 7.1% said they were willing to use violence 'to kill people'. In addition, 18.5% of all respondents answered that they would be armed with guns when political violence was justified, and 4% said that they would actually shoot. Was also seen.

by Tyler Merbler

The research team suspects that the conspiracy theory rooted in racism may be behind the formation of this view of political violence. As mentioned earlier, more than 40% believed in the Great Replacement , a conspiracy theory that 'whites are being replaced by immigrants to win elections,' and 'American institutions worship the devil.' Nearly 20% believed in QAnon 's conspiracy theory that it was dominated by an elite group of pediatric lovers.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a political violence expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study, said in an interview about the results of this study, 'This is a study to shock people. It's not, but it should be taken with shock. '