Still, I don’t know about that. While troops have been used to control rioting, these have been extreme examples, and have nearly always been met with an extreme amount of soul-searching afterward over the appropriateness of these actions.
The Kent State shooting certainly qualifies. The use of National Guard troops to put down prison riots led to one of the only pieces of case law to test the Third Amendment. And the use of Army troops to bust up the Bonus Army was incredibly controversial and gave impetus later to the G.I. Bill.
A simplistic, and paranoid, view. I believe your opinion is that all of the military are nothing but jackbooted thugs, however, so I guess it’s to be expected.
The National Guard is largely made up of people, with families, who live in the communities they protect. The Federal Government can only activate / Federalise them for a short period of time and only with the consent of the State Governor. I can’t imagine a situation where mothers and fathers and young men and women, from small towns all over America and living in those towns (not on a base somewhere) would check their guns out of the armories and use them against their own people in their own towns in their own state. I just can’t see it.
BTW - I was USAF 1991-1994, Montana Air National Guard 1995-1997, and Oregon Air National Guard 1997-1999. I know a bit of what I speak.
Yup. My point exactly - any time military force has been used against the civilian populace, whether Active Duty or Guard, inside the US, there has been a massive backlash by the citizens and the Army itself. Posse Commitatus ain’t toothless, is my point.
As opposed to your simplistic, pollyannish, and chauvinistic view that American soldiers are innately morally superior to non-American soldiers ? Your apparent belief that unlike untold millions of soldiers throughout history, they could never be used to oppress their own people ?
From my relatively uninformed living-abroad view, Barack Obama seems like just another slick politician. But he repulses me less than Hillary, Giuliani, and McCain, and I don’t really know too much about the others. My 2 worthless cents.
And how exactly do you get chauvinistic from my comments? Do you know what that word means, or are you just trolling through your thesaurus looking for insults? And when did I ever say, or even imply, that US Soldiers were morally superior to any others? Methinks you’re reading into my comments things that were neither said nor implied.
I was talking about the intentions of the framers of the Constitution in writing the Second Amendment, and somehow you’re managed to tweak the argument around to give yourself a chance to go off on your ‘US MILITARY IS TEH EVILEST’ ™ rant for the 200th time. :rolleyes:
I believe it is very unlikely for the National Guard to supress Americans and have given my reasons why. All you’ve given back is insults and vitriol.
GomiBoy’s argument is not simplistic at all. It’s based on a reasoned analysis of human behavior.
Der Trihs’s argument is based off of appeals to emotion, and acts as though military history occurs in a vacuum where personal ties to the community are irrelevant. Militaries have been used to oppress the people where they live many times, but there are often separating factors that draw a line between the military and the populace that accounts for those. For instance, the military is from another province within the nation, like getting the aid of nobles from one side of the nation to attack the lands of the upstart region. Most countries are divided along ethnic lines, and oftentimes one ethnicity is used to oppress the other, such as the case with the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, where the Tutsis were used by the Belgians to oppress the Hutus and then when the Tutsis fell out of favor, then the Hutus oppressed the Tutsis. Some countries such as Japan had a separation by caste, where the warrior caste would follow their duty to the letter. In the case of Soviet Russia, there was a history of secret police oppression, first from the Tsars against everyone, and then with the Party against the Tsarists.
Such a division does not exist in the United States. You will see no regiments from Tennessee marching on California. We just are not organized that way. The National Guard would be hard pressed to turn their rifles on the state they are from.
I misremembered this as being a riot. It was a strike. Still, my point about domestic actions by the military being examined closely afterward should still hold.
If BHO weren’t black (actually, half black posing as black), no one would notice him. He is a suit empty of all but bromides.
I like Hilary and Rudy because they are edgy and real. You see their foibles clearly. BHO is way too slick for me. I don’t know what he really thinks; he spends all his time sounding moderate. I don’t know if he really has a moral center, an idea that he would stand by even if it alienated people.
He has manufactured a past to fabricate a present.
I like how successful Rush Limbaugh was in spreading the meme that Barack Obama is not ‘authentically black’. Let’s appeal to racism, and act like he’s pretending to be something he’s not when he’s not pretending anything at all.