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The army would benefit by recruiting people with a disposition for violence if the army were willing to properly discipline them and by that I mean traditional means of discipline---flogging, hanging by the thumbs, running gauntlets, riding rails and so forth.
Frederick the Great and Wellington won many battles leading properly motivated scum of the earth.
The military already has a gang problem, it doesn't need anymore knuckle-draggers running around. Stick their sorry asses in jail where they belong. Serving in the armed forces is a privilege, not a right. It's time to stop coddling criminals and looking for ways to rehabilitate them or reform them. Change the prison system...no more TV, gyms, internet, college courses, magazines, commissaries, or looking the other way in regard to drug abuse in prison, drug dealing, weapons or rapes. Feed them just enough to survive, and work them to the bone 14 hours a day. Make prison a place they will fear, not a place they can thrive. Right now there is no incentive to make gangs fear prison, they run the prisons.
At least they would be doing something more positive.
Provide a concise definition of "gangbangers".
If they have not violated any laws which would prevent them from meeting the current and continuing standards, then I see no problem allowing them to serve. I do not feel we should change anything just to accommodate them.
I knew some "ex" gangbangers in the USMC and they were still a bunch of troublemakers. They took drugs, stole money orders, bounced checks and committed many other crimes. If they don't want to change, I don't think being forced into the military will do any good for them or the military.
Changing times right now. Most kids I have seen that come in already have their Associates or on their way to getting one or working on their Bachelor's. Recruiters get to sift through their list of those people vs. kids with troubled past or criminal records. Guess who they pick? Bootcamp may weed out the unqualified further. Although, some new troops I've seen, I often wonder "How did they ever let you in??" but some managed to straighten out, and the rest are out of the door. I'm speaking from my experience in my branch, of course.
If they have not violated any laws which would prevent them from meeting the current and continuing standards, then I see no problem allowing them to serve. I do not feel we should change anything just to accommodate them.
Rich
OK, maybe the kids on the borderline or have committed non serious crimes. The kids who need a little push in the right direction. Because the more time they put toward gang life the deeper they get in the gangster life style, which is always bad.
At least they would be doing something more positive.
Not only no, but HELL NO!!!!
The military does not want a bunch of losers with societal maladjustement issues in the ranks.
No soldier wants to serve with someone they cannot trust.
No officer wants to lead a unit where he has to spend half his time worrying about being fragged by a low-level sociopath with authourity issues and access to deadly weapons.
No country wants to try and win "Hearts and Minds" in a LIC enviroment with an army full of criminals.
No community wants to deal with a population of Bangers with serious military training. A&E did a story in its "Gangland" series about the infiltration of 'bangers into the military. The headline story was about a banger who joined the Marines, did a tour in Iraq, came home, got out, fell back in w/ his "homies". This loser got stoned & went out an waxed 2 cops & shot 2 others using standard Marine assault tactics & an AK before they could bring him down.
The military is not a reform school or a warehouse for low level offenders. Let's keep it that way.
>>But recent studies of military demographics suggest that today's military is neither uneducated nor poor. Statistically, the enlisted ranks of the military are drawn mainly from neighborhoods that are slightly more affluent than the norm. The very poor are actually underrepresented in the military, relative to the number of very poor people in the population.
That's mainly because the military won't accept the lowest academic achievers. The Army limits recruits without high school degrees to 3 1/2 % of the pool, for instance, while the Marines won't accept recruits without high school degrees. Poverty correlates strongly with high school dropout rates, so these rules significantly limit the access of the very poor to military service.
At the same time, they ensure that enlisted members of the military are more likely than members of the general population to have high school degrees. The same pattern holds for commissioned officers. In 2004, for instance, only 4.2% of officers lacked college degrees, and a whopping 37% held an advanced degree of some sort, compared to only 10% of adults nationwide.<<
>>Frank Schaeffer — coauthor with Kathy Roth-Douquet of "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service" and "Baby Jack," a novel about a father who loses his Marine son in Iraq — notes that the percentage of enlisted military personnel from households with more than $60,000 in annual income is close to zero. Military recruiters don't even bother to recruit in affluent neighborhoods: They know no one's going to sign up. At elite universities — Harvard, Stanford and Yale, for instance — the percentage of graduates who enter the military is minuscule.
All this should bother us — a lot. The United States needs a strong and adaptable military — and in this globalized world, the importance of the military both in U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics is likely to increase, not decrease, in the coming decades. But a democracy needs a military that's not radically out of step with the values and hopes of civilians; and those who volunteer to risk their lives in our name deserve civilian leaders who understand something about the realities of service and combat. If we want an effective military that serves a healthy democracy, political and economic elites ought to shoulder more of the burden. <<
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Should gangbangers be pushed toward military?
