The three whites in the group tell him, in turn, where they are from originally: Florida, Missouri and Colorado.

“Missouri, Colorado … that’s what I am talking about – America.”

Then he asks the last journalist, who is scared speechless, and can only stutter, “Honggg … Kong.”

The militiaman promptly shoots him.

Many in the audience gasped. My wife and I didn’t react appropriately, I suppose. Maybe it’s some kind of gallows humour we felt out of kinship with the dead character. We are both journalists from Hong Kong; and we would both be dead in that situation.

Until recently, probably before former president Donald Trump, such a film would have been considered controversial, and self-styled American patriots such as those in the US Congress would have denounced it.

Nowadays, though, with all the glaring racial, ideological and religious divisions in the United States – and the likely return of Trump to the White House, the premise of the film not only doesn’t sound outlandish or offensive, but also highly plausible.

Fewer Americans want to study in China. Both countries want to fix that

One critic calls Civil War, “one of the hardest films to watch, and the most important you’ll see this year”.

More than 40 per cent of Americans thought civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next 10 years, according to a 2022 survey, but that figure jumped to more than half among self-identified “strong Republicans”.

Many political scientists now believe the US qualifies as an anocracy, that is, neither an autocracy nor a democracy, but something in between. The US’ sliding position on various international democratic scales or indexes offers them ample evidentiary support.

An anocracy is most susceptible to internal strife because a full autocracy has the repressive capabilities to put down any rebellion, while a genuine democracy has the kind of give-and-take compromise politics that prevents people from sliding into violent and open conflicts.

According to How Civil Wars Start, a 2022 book by Barbara Walter, a University of California, San Diego political science professor, the accelerant and ingredients of civil war in an anocracy include, respectively, an unchecked social media, and ethnic and religious factionalisation, extreme inequalities and the factions of what she calls, “sons of the soil”. The latter are individuals with deep histories in a country, typically rural, who resent the incursions of immigrants and urban elites into traditional society.

One thing she doesn’t emphasise enough, though, I think, is the supply and availability of weapons.

Interestingly, James Madison, one of America’s founding fathers and one of the three authors of the Federalist Papers, did think a lot about private arms, so much so that he wrote a whole Federalist paper on the subject.

One reason civil wars last is because the combatants, usually supported as proxies by outside forces, have an unlimited supply of weapons.

America doesn’t have to worry about running out of weapons; it is by far the world’s biggest arms dealer. But just consider its domestic gun ownership.

According to the 2017 Small Arms Survey, there were 393 million legally owned guns, while the population was then 326 million. That was 120.5 guns for every 100 people. Of course, that didn’t count the millions of illegal arms circulating in and out of the country.

A more recent Pew Research Centre study showed about four in 10 US adults lived in a household with guns, and 32 per cent of all adults personally owned a firearm.

Madison would have been thrilled because he thought private arms and the ability of states to organise local militias were crucial to deterring tyranny.

Federalist No 46: “Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate [state] governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”

The Americans’ success at fighting off their British overlords rests on their ability to raise arms, Madison argues, while their ability to keep their liberties depends on them keeping their arms and organising themselves as state militias.

America’s sick obsession with China will ruin itself and the world

He continues: “Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes.

“But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.”

No 46 provides the most direct ideological justification for the Second Amendment. America’s “gun nuts” are always repeating Madison’s arguments, one way or another, even if they have never read a single Federalist paper.

As an aside, I have always thought the fate of Alexander Hamilton – Madison’s Federalist Papers co-author and eventual enemy – should be a cautionary tale against private arms: Hamilton died in a duel.

Madison thinks tyranny in a government exists as an objective fact, when it’s more often a matter of perception and ideology. For example, Marxists think the capitalist state is always a class-driven tyranny over exploited workers.

It is not necessary for a state of tyranny to actually exist, but that enough people, armed to the teeth, believe there is one. Many Americans think taxes are legalised theft. Many Trump supporters think the big bad federal government is corrupt and tyrannical, which may be true, but the alternative may be much worse. Many such Americans, no doubt believing themselves true patriots and defending democracy, stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021

It isn’t so hard now to imagine that fateful day being prolonged and descending into something like Alex Garland’s Civil War.