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Are you serious? You're giving them too much credit. They'd be squashed in two seconds if they ever organized. North Korea is a threat. Not some hillbillies in your neck of the woods with a few deer hunting rifles that don't have jobs. A larger threat locally that's been around forever and needs no speculation is inner city youths with no jobs, no education and guns. They started calling Chicago "Chiraq".

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A lot of blood could be shed before anything was "squashed".

Have you ever been in a civil war? I have. There are more guns in Houston, TX than there ever was in Baghdad. Local police/fire are cut from the same cloth as the locals, they'd be sympathetic to their neighbors. How do I know? They say so.

Also, there is nothing more terrifying or effective in a civil war than a sniper. Source: been there done that. The U.S. has the largest standing army in the world on opening day of deer season, all with high powered rifles and scopes.

Any uprising could be squashed eventually, but it would take a lot of ordnance, blood, and time.

Which civil war were you in? Where and when did this take place?

I'm assuming op is a military veteran that was sent overseas to protect US interests in a civil war; one such example would be Somalia in the 90s.

Baghdad '04 and '05.

Ok so how does Iraq apply to your suggestion that a civil unrest and civil war in our country could easily break out when Texans with guns hit high unemployment?

You also cited Houston which is the 4th largest city that has a crime problem not due to deer hunters, but of inner city folks and saw a crime rate explosion from an influx of people post-Katrina that had lost everything and had little job prospects. You didn't see country people from the gulf area bringing deer rifles into the city shooting people up and starting civil war.

EDIT: to JakeTheAndroid - the parent mentioned as part of their fear - "The U.S. has the largest standing army in the world on opening day of deer season, all with high powered rifles and scopes."

There's no evidence to suggest that those deer hunters would organize in the event of high employment to incite civil unrest which would result in civil war. We saw a rise in crime but did not see civil war when people lost everything with Katrina. And the rural people feared the most didn't do what was suggested.

The crime I'm talking about in the cities, esp. Houston, has existed for a long time. Rising unemployment does lead to more crime in the inner city, primarily by inner city people. I don't see deer hunters organizing and posing a threat. In fact, I'd guess they'd hunker down and protect their property and community and probably assist in any local response to the civil unrest if necessary, not the other way around, posing a threat to other citizens and the government itself as the OP speculates.

I think OP made the connection pretty clear.

In Iraq, the military attempted to take cities in turmoil and were successfully held by normal, everyday people not nearly as well armed as people in TX. You then support the statement by pointing out its already a dangerous place full of armed people being malicious.

OP didn't say deer hunters are the cause of crime, but pointed out normal people there, that well armed with high powered, long range rifles are numerous. They'd likely pose a huge threat.

So, if civil unrest was to break out due to unemployment, this seems like a potentially difficult situation for everyone involved. Pretty plausible to me.

I think the a general human pattern has been established that high unemployment leads to civil unrest, especially when you look in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Sure, you could say that their society is much different than ours, but that difference is shrinking, and I think claiming we are somehow exceptional requires some evidence, not the other way around. (Now that we're facing significant headwinds over the last 30 years, we're seeing our society becoming more violent via shootings, terrorism, and corrections, etc.)

Well, those Texas/southern hillbillies are the ones running the US military.

Military workforce by state:

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/military-civilian-active-d...

Yah, imagine everyone at Fort Hood being ordered to invade Dallas and half the tanks driving off in the night to go protect the neighborhood they grew up in.

Which is why if such orders were being issued it'd be more like blue state stationed divisions sent to quell uprisings in red state areas and vice versa. This is a huge part of why I think a growing political divide is such a problem - we can be easily persuaded to attack each other when the problem isn't each other but the ones issuing the orders.

Texas is split inside itself:

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/texas

(The map is even still a lie; there are large counties that voted Republican, but the majority of the red by area is tiny little county populations.)

I also don't think that people are particularly stationed by their home state.

And everyone at Ft. Hood will just sit there while Dallas is leveled.

First you'd need a political purge of the Army. Anything less would leave the door open to a split in the military. I think history supports this well.

A division stationed in a blue state isn't going to be made up of locals. It's going to have the same mix as the US military in general (read: Mostly southern states).

The National Guard will be more representative of their home base, but that is going to be smaller forces that complement active duty, not replace it.

I was meaning more of metaphorical constructs of blue and red rather than just the political jargon and probably should have used quotes. I'm an army brat and former DoD IC contractor and know very well how distributed personnel get.

Or Blackwater (Xe) mercenaries.

There just aren't enough.

North Korea isn't really a threat. Not such a one that the rusty superpower should obsess over it and follow it on evening news.

Any country with nukes and a disdain and distrust for both its own people and any country not like them is definitely a threat. Look back at history - the biggest threats were the ones that did terrible things to their own people.

We're talking about a country with 100k+ CCTVs monitoring their own people, loaded with anti-US and anti-South Korean propaganda, forbids internet usage, starves its people, has a top 5 military while being the size of Pennsylvania, and enslaves 200k+ of their own people falsely.

What evidence do you have that they are not a threat?

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