Remember the panic over militias sending their members into the military for training to use in fighting the government later? What ever happened to that?

I'm not saying the lowering of standards in the military isn't real, worrisome, or indicative of other problems, but I do think the particular issue of gang members in the military is bound to be sort of a flavor of the month of panic.

After all, aren't the armed forces basically the best-established brainwashers in the country? Maybe those gang members will come out with more self respect (or at least powerfully internalized discipline), like the ads say.

Isn't this the very thing the KKK and Aryan nation have been doing for years. How many Hell's Angels where WW2 Vets? Nothings new under the sun.

Joel, The Angels formed AFTER WWII, as a consequence of disillusionment with The State, their first chapter was, I believe, in California. Hunter S Thompson did a great biography of this. Bradford, great violence indeed. The gang members learn Urban Warfare but so do 'ordinary' soldiers, you know, the ones that are going to come home, join SWAT teams and blow down doors to arrest and kill your little brother for smoking pot. I'd say that it is a "Win-Win" in game theory, non?

First of all gangs are different than ideological groups based on racial supremacy with different aims and should not be lumped together.
Lumping together all people with felonies is ignorant. People who sell drugs, even those who commit robberies, have vastly different psychological profiles than those with anti-social personalities or those whose involvement with systematic hierarchies of power and violence mirrored in the military.

A post of this nature is justification for those unwilling to delve further into the domestic issues we are supposedly so upset the military is usurping funds from.

First of all gangs are different than ideological groups based on racial supremacy with different aims and should not be lumped together.
Lumping together all people with felonies is ignorant. People who sell drugs, even those who commit robberies, have vastly different psychological profiles than those with anti-social personalities or those whose involvement with systematic hierarchies of power and violence mirrored in the military.

A post of this nature is justification for those unwilling to delve further into the domestic issues we are supposedly so upset the military is usurping funds from.

No matter how big a gang is, the community is still bigger. People who use violence and intimidation to achieve their aims are criminals, typically, and that's why society pays so much for prisons and law enforcement. The bitter fact that sentencing laws are too lenient, and that the military is considering harvesting people practically right out of the
jails implies that the military's standards have dropped considerably. I think it's a matter of time before the pendulum swings back the other way, and people realize that an army of hooligans is no army at all.

To say that gangs aren't political or ideological is naive, the Hell's Angels for instance have been noted for having quite right leaning tendencies, and they sell drugs. The Aryan nations groups sell drugs and commint bank robberies, the KKK is very political even fielding politicians, David Duke for instance. The Latin Kings are have been quite political in the last few decades, they have sold drugs, they have supported school lunches. There are many "latin only gangs" and "African-American only gangs", just as there where once Irish, Italian and Jewish Gangs.

All of these groups practiced large community politics to protect their activities, while still maintaining theire extra legal activities in their smaller social circles. Any human being involved in a community is "political", to belong to a group is to ascribe to the groups ideology (even if that is to just raise money to party). Small groups differentiate themselves be being exclusionary whether that be via race, sex, family ties, religion or diet.

Joining a military organization to learn further organization skills, discipline, tactics, and bonding is a distinctly political act. An act that cannot be construed as anti-social. People with anti-social personalities do not organize into gangs, parties, nor willingly partipate in large organizations.

So no there is no substansive difference between minority urban gangs and rural idealogical organizations. They all share common values with their members, they often have ties that bind them together, they practice extra-legal activities such as selling drugs. White supremesists sell drugs, jewish kids sell drugs, suburban kids sell drugs, African-American gangs sell drugs, Biker gangs sell drugs, College Students who belong to fraternaties sell drugs, People in the US military sell drugs.

This may be a bizarre idea, but bear with me. I just took a class called "youth, Drugs and gangs" for my human services minor. One of the main reasons that kids join gangs is to replace a part of their social growth that, for some reason, they are lacking. In gangs, kids find roles for themselves, expectations, and role models. To turn kids away from gangs, we (society) would have to replace gangs as a social function with something else. To me, the military could serve that function. It could offer these kids the structure and sense of responsibility that they may be lacking.
Now, I'm not saying that we should ship all gang members to the military, but if it could help change the lives of a few kids, why not?
The key to this whole idea is, what happens to these gang members when they leave the military? If they return to the same neighborhood, their chances of success might not be as high as they would if they were to move to a different area.
It's just an idea.

Re: Gangs in the military

David Malone's point is interesting and possibly may prove to be true. If these gang members come out of the military as better persons than 'good' has come of that.

Misbehaving people have been sent/sentenced to serve military duty or go to jail for a long time, certainly that occurred during WWII. Just think of the greater good that would have occurred if dubya had been committed to active military service for his alcohol and drug abuse. That is assuming his parents might have had the wisdom to go along with such a sentence instead of protecting their 'little boy' as they did. America would have had a better president. The same goes for Cheney, Rove, Gonzales etc. etc. Instead just look at what America has now from these
classless people who have become our national leaders via a long history of what they call 'public service' which turns out to be nothing more than them becoming warped and misguided neocons who are bent upon achieving "A New World Order" which benefits only themselves and their equally warped friends.

That is why I believe in mandatory military service, especially for children of the wealthy who can buy their children out of such service by bribing congressman and judges. The wealthy and their children do not in any way receive a true, accurate or representative experience in daily America. These people lead a life which is completely out of touch with the experiences of real, average, everyday, ordinary American citizens. Their warped upbringing is okay until they get into government service of any kind. Then their, to say the least, ATYPICAL upbringing renders their government service useless and terribly out of touch with the realities of true, normal, average Americans life styles because their entire viewpoint of life is completely skewed.

Some wealthy parents make certain that their children are well grounded in the realities of life, especially in the realities of life that the everyday, ordinary, average American citizen experiences. These people do a real service to their children but how many wealthy parents do that and my guess is not many.

So 'we the people' get the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Gonzales, Rice, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, Roberts most of the neocons and seemingly most of the members of the Republican party and most members of the radical religious right wing fundamentalists. These latter are blinded by their concern for the unborn fetus but care not at all for the child once he/she is born. If they truly cared and were truly pro-life than they would support,with equal vehemence, the lives and welfare of all children after they are born and throughout their childhood seeing to it that our government provides adequate education, healthcare and wages for families. Do they call for any of the above, absolutely not.

The aforementioned are members of the arrogant elite and attend universities like Yale and Princeton where they belong to groups like 'The Order of Skull and Bones', the 'Council on Foreign Relations', the Trilateral Commission and that group of students and adults at Princeton that Alito belonged to. It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine that Samuel Alito belonged to a group of arrogant elite bastards that wanted to keep women and minorities out of Princeton, and now that clown is a Supreme Court Justice. He had better never darken my Italian Catholic doorstep because I will verbally dress him down and spit in his face, how could he consider himself to be an American and how can 'we the people' ever expect to get any semblance of justice from him. Alito is just simply human 'drek'.

Anyway, back to the issue of gang members going into the military wherein they may learn skills and behaviors that will serve them well once they get out. If these gang members learn some patriotism they may agressively engage in taking back our country from those who diminish our democracy like those in the Bush/Repub administration.

These gang members turned patriots active participation in our American Democracy would be a truly great turn of events.