This question was inspired by a post on lemmy.zip about lowering the minimum age to purchase firearms in the US, and a lot of commeters brought up military service and training as a benchmark to normal civilians, and how if guns would be prevalent, then firearm training should be more common.
For reference, I live in the USA, where the minimum age to join the military is 18, but joining is, for the most part, optional. I also know some friends that have gone through the military, mostly for college benefits, and it has really messed them up. However, I have also met some friends from south korea, where I understand military service is mandatory before starting a more normal career. From what I’ve heard, military service was treated more as a trade school, because they were never deployed, in comparison to American troops.
I just wanted to know what the broader Lemmy community thought about mandatory military service is, especially from viewpoints outside the US.
how if guns would be prevalent
hahahaha ‘would’ hahahhahhah. hilarious.
a huge contigent of domestic terrorism in the united states is ex-military white guys. also, a huge percentage of the homeless population are veterans… it clearly leaves a psychological stain we then refuse to mop up. but yeah, lets push everyone through agencies with the worst sexual assault tallies in the country. awesome.
You don’t use a mop to clean up a stain, you mop up a spill which can then leave a stain. You have to scrub a stain and maybe use something like vinegar or baking soda.
“Fuck off”
I am absolutely against it. You cannot force a person to give 100% of their effort. So if a person doesn’t wanna be there. They’re not going to put forward 100%. Wanna guess who picks up the rest.? Yeah that’s right their teammates. Now their teammates are pissed off because they’re doing extra work. That destroys morale . It doesn’t matter what type of job they have whether it’s infantry or office based or whatever the end result is the same.
It’s one of the reasons why when you enlist when you’re going through training, it really is not that hard to get out of training. During the Vietnam era you pretty much had to throw yourself down a flight of stairs and break your leg or something. Today, yeah it’s significantly easier to leave.
Because the mentality is, if you don’t wanna be there then just go home.
Special operations takes it to the next level they have (for example with the seals) a bell that you ring. Literally just walk up ring the bell and you’re done.
I have met a few vets, but not very many people who served who think military should be mandatory. The vast majority of people have served say : no service should not be mandatory. At least the ones that I’ve met.
I have met a fair number civilians who thinks military service should be mandatory though.
My response to the title: No
If I am being forced to, I will try to steer it towards any non-combant service like IT or (if necessary) social service.
Yeah it’s weird that people always ask this question in terms of military service.
I think mandatory public service would be good, with an option to choose non-combatant military roles
I’ve thought a required 2 years military or 1 year in a customer service job like retail right after high school would make fast change to people’s attitudes and empathy.
I worked retail on a military base, you’d think they’d be better behaved that civilians, but they aren’t. Especially the Chief’s wives.
No, I won’t be addressing you by the rank of your equivalent to middle management husband.
maybe not, but from what i’ve seen the consequences are more fair, you don’t get 10 years in prison for doing dumbshit, you get 1000 pushups, or bathroom duty for a year, weird stuff like that. the only thing i really hated about the military was the E1s trolling high school hallways picking up underage girls. that shit was fucked.
Amazingly, I’m not a big fan of slavery.
Join the military, die for your (oil) billionairs! Its an honor!
I am for it only because it helps avoid politicization of the armed forces. When the military self-selects recruits, you risk the organization biasing towards people with a particular worldview. It intrinsicially also leads to a military comprised of people who love the idea of being a “military person”.
It’s much more reassuring knowing your armed forces, the people with the big guns, are your neighbors, rather than strangers with a particular ideology or biased loyalties.
It’s much more reassuring knowing your armed forces, the people with the big guns, are your neighbors, rather than strangers with a particular ideology or biased loyalties.
How about compulsory national guard service?
Do you think the national guard isn’t a component of the military?
That is correct. The National Guard is (part of) the militia, not the military. 10 USC 246.
The Military consists of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and now the Space Force. The “Armed Services” includes the above, plus the Coast Guard and the National Guard.
The National Guard consists of state-level units operating under the authority of the state’s governor. They can be called forth to federal service. They could, arguably, be considered part of the military when called forth. But generally speaking, no, the National Guard is not a component of the military.
The problem with your reasoning is that you can (and many people have) been given duty outside the United States of America when directed by the Federal Government (POTUS). So while I can appreciate you making the distinction, for the purposes of this discussion I’m not sure just how relevant that distinction is.
Joining the military, you would expect to be living separate and apart from the local communities. You’ll spend a year or two at one posting, before being transferred to another, and another, and another. You won’t expect to set down roots in the local community. The people you are serving with will be constantly rotating in and out of your current unit on similar schedules; you can expect any friendships you form to last a few months, before you or they are transferred again.
Joining the National Guard, you will be serving primarily in your home state, at the call of your own governor. You’ll spend your entire career in your own community, serving with other people in that same community. Even when you deploy, you are deploying with people you’ve known your whole career, if not your whole life: your friends and neighbors.
The militia is not the military.
Joining the military, you would expect to be living separate and apart from the local communities.<<
As someone who joined the military, that’s not really how that works and if you’re getting your information from memes and content creators, perhaps it might be a better idea not to continue this conversation because I really don’t want to have to go into detail about how flawed that first sentence is, let alone the rest of it.
I served in the military from '99 through '05.
In California, the only military members I knew of who had California drivers licenses were people who had grown up in California. Nobody else in considered themselves a “resident” of California.
We were briefed on how to obtain absentee ballots from our home states, because most of us didn’t qualify as residents at our post.
We were advised to file taxes in our home states, not the states where we were living and working.
The parking lots on base had more out-of-state license plates than in-state.
Military members and their dependents are guests of the local community. Visitors. Tourists. Not locals. We aren’t in their communities long enough to become locals.
I’m against forcing 18 year olds to use guns. Give them some alternative like civil/public service and do something good for society.
I’d prefer it be more of a mandatory civil service than actual military. If that includes basic weapons training that’s ok with me.
Singapore does this too and you see them everywhere, with their rifle (ammo less).
I don’t think it would have any impact on gun violence though.
That would actually be pretty great. Everyone having some experience with having to deal with the hassles and pains of common civil service would be a wonderful eye-opener.
Just imagine if instead of millitary service, it was compulsary public service that actually benefitted society. Nursing, construction/infrastructure, farming, teaching/childcare, etc.
Its astrounding how much money is pumped into the military industrial complex when it could be used to fund to many other programs for public good.
But that would be sOciALiSm.
AmeriCorps is exactly this, but it’s obviously not compulsory.
Does that still exist?
This is exactly what I would want a compulsory service to look like.
Fuck the military, let’s build bridges and houses and schools, and cafeterias, and farms, and staff them. Roads and hospitals.
Nobody ever needed to make a fucking bomb
This exists in Austria. Males have to choose between 6 months of military or 9 months of public service. Interestingly enough the existence of the public service option has been a strong reason why people voted against removing the mandatory service some years ago.
Out of curiosity, what do they do for public service?
Driving ambulance cars and doing first aid, helping in kindergarten, retirement homes, homeless shelters, institutions for people with disabilities,…
The ambulance is probably the most popular position, you can also choose what you want to do to a certain extent.
That’s too good of an idea to be usable, the powers that don’t want it would tell the nurses, construction workers and farmers their livelihoods were being undermined by slave labour.
Some places you can opt to do compulsory public service instead of military service.
I think compulsory retail service would fix society.
I fully support this. It would help on so many levels. Provide a cheap workforce to help with currently in demand stuff and fix shit, help young people get away from home, get a new view on life and get some starter cash, and mix people from all walks of life. I genuinely see no downside.
More hilarious when considering the US Military is an inherently socialist institution.
My sister and brother-in-law will go to the commissary, stay on base housing, get their paycheck from the US Govt., receive public Healthcare, and the GI Bill, then promptly go home and post on Facebook about how socialism bad.
Realizing the US Army is the most socialist institution I’ve ever encountered didn’t happen till years after I was out, lol
You want school? Get it! You want food? Get it! You want clothes? You already fucking got em
I’m not sure from the context of your comment with that “most socialist” line if you know or not but…
Socialism is the workers owning the means of production. End line.
Everything else is just how the society organizes itself. The US Army seeing to the basic needs of its troops is not socialism, it is the government doing things. Scandinavian countries providing maternity and unemployment benefits is not socialism. It is the government doing things.
The US Army is not socialism. Nor is any other professional military, not even the ones working for socialist states. They are organizations trading capital for labor to empower the state.
If you were a slave soldier, taken in a war raid, working for a monarch like the Janissaries, they would probably still provide you all of the necessities to function, even spending money to entertain yourself and maintain morale, and it wouldn’t be socialism either.
Socialism is the workers owning the means of production.
For instance, Trump’s plan for the feds to buy TikTok
Hell no.
The premise of M-L types who wanted the state to control production for the workers is that the government was the workers, aka the dictatorship of the proletariat. In doing so excess production would be traded within the system to provide things like healthcare and housing.
In theory.
That obviously didn’t work out too hot, but even that is different in theory from a fascist or otherwise oligarchal state controlling production for the benefit of the owner class with absolutely no pretentions of providing social services with the profits. They are proudly ripping up any social safety net they find as a matter of ideology.
Tl;Dr it’s quite literally the opposite of socialism when kings or oligarchs control and profit from the state owned enterprise. That is just the eponymous late stage capitalism, or neofeudalism/technocracy depending on the angle you want.
It’s socialism as described by the GOP though, which is why it’s so funny.
Yeah, but at the same time that’s how they logic themselves into “the more things the government does the more socialist it is, and when it does a lot of things, that’s communism.”
All that misinformation has a purpose, and it’s not to make the world a better place.
I don’t think that would be any better. It is still compulsory service and a violation of people’s individual freedoms to choose how to live their lives.
(and many countries do allow that as an alternative e.g. for conscientious objectors)
Compare Switzerland. Everyone after secondary school gets a year learning how to work as a team and practice interdependence.
Seems like it’s working really well for them, as they have more guns per capita and almost zero mass shootings. Maybe that’s the thing they’re doing right?
Personally I don’t have an issue with it as it’s the only chance I and other poor kids had for entering college.
I had the idea that mass shootings were more of a cultural phenomenon exacerbated by the media. I mean, we don’t have them in my country either. And although some older people have gone through compulsory military training, it’s been slowly rescinded for the younger generations so it makes me wonder if that has any effect on people’s willingness to go on shooting sprees.
Switzerland was an inspiration for much of the american laws I believe. The second amendment used to say “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”. The American got rid of the militia (the training) and kept the guns, now we have chaos.
I’m not for it but if mandatory service were a thing the population would be more hesitant to go to war knowing their flesh and blood might be included
The elite pay the politic to not let their precious off-spring be conscripted.
And if they can’t they will probably be send of to a foreign boarding school.Yeah but the elite are a very tiny fraction of the population. I’m talking about the general population.
If we have 100 percent service and they don’t serve then they don’t get the rights of citizenship either.
Sure, but it will never be 100% because there are medical excuses. And they will get someone to sign a paper saying they already served and were discharged because X. Where X is something serious enough for them not to get called back but not serious enough to be immediately noticeable or too harmful outside of the military, e.g. poor eyesight, torn ligament on the leg, etc. So their kids still won’t serve.
That’s why you do other things too. Ambulance drivers, library helpers, school assistants, construction corps, etc…
Hunter safety is a gun safety class that under age kids can take to help build good habits when handling firearms. Maybe people could use those instead.
Fuck your military slave bullshit. Fuck it forever.
I have never heard of hunter safety. Then again, I live in the city and most of the folks I know are cosplay hunters who brag about one day hunting a deer but would cry if they ever had to skin a rabbit.
Any organizations you can recommend?
In Connecticut it’s required before you can get a hunting license
We could use this, but after basic the year is spent in the country in communities doing public works. There also need to be zero loopholes, zero outs. People from all over the country from all walks of life and all classes live and work together. There was a brief benefit after WWII when men and women came home from service having worked and lived with people from all over the country. Farm boys with no education fought side by side with men who had been to ivy league schools. There was a net benefit to it.
Completely fucked up.
