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[RedKing]

"Those Marines were all Hillary supporters. Believe me, we checked. Terrible people. The Marines are the worst, always have been. Such a bunch of bad people, immigrant-loving...did you know some of the Marines are immigrants themselves?? It's true! Swear to God..."

[Hanslanda]

/strawman 😛

[Madman198237]

MSH, do remember that the military is not made of a bunch of genocidal robots or homicidally insane human beings. They're regular people who have been trained to react in specific ways to specific situations, almost none of which actually apply to their present deployment. When shot at, they shoot back, seek cover, etc. etc. When not being shot at, they're regular human beings who decided to take a job with the military. Very, very few are going to be the sort of sociopath who can actually just start shooting people down like you're proposing they're going to do.

[Gentlefish]

And we're assuming that the majority of the caravan won't come right up to the border, legally, and legally, request asylum in the United States?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You don't murder people from insanity. You murder other people from choice. Your regular human beings are the bulk of murderers. Those most approved of by society are those employed in acts of mass murder, by the very nature of their approval.

The dehumanization of immigrants and non-white people means that there's no reason to believe that there will be any hesitation on the part of the military to kill them, regardless of their "normalcy". Not that I'd expect there to be as much normalcy as you believe. Those guys who murdered the people of Haditha were nice normal patriots who would never sociopathically slaughter people and piss on their corpses. Didn't make a single difference.

[MrRoboto75]

MSH, do remember that the military is not made of a bunch of genocidal robots or homicidally insane human beings. They're regular people who have been trained to react in specific ways to specific situations, almost none of which actually apply to their present deployment. When shot at, they shoot back, seek cover, etc. etc. When not being shot at, they're regular human beings who decided to take a job with the military. Very, very few are going to be the sort of sociopath who can actually just start shooting people down like you're proposing they're going to do.

Trump really wishes they were, though.  Which is why he tried to classify rocks as live firearms.

[Kagus]

When not being shot at, they're regular human beings who decided to take a job with the military.

Regular human beings, just with a religious devotion to certain snack foods and a propensity for enriching games that include banging their heads into things.

[Doomblade187]

And we're assuming that the majority of the caravan won't come right up to the border, legally, and legally, request asylum in the United States?

No, we're assuming they will. But trump may try and pull something to say that they're 'attacking' the ports of entry.

[Madman198237]

You don't murder people from insanity. You murder other people from choice. Your regular human beings are the bulk of murderers. Those most approved of by society are those employed in acts of mass murder, by the very nature of their approval.

No. It is a well-documented phenomenon that even trained soldiers balk at firing back. Firing back, not just "firing" in general. They have psychological trouble firing back at an opponent actively firing at them or their buddies, no matter how much they've been dehumanized and vilified and whatnot. Instead they fire, if they fire at all, above the heads of their enemy, or off to the side, or any number of places that doesn't have a human being in the sights. Modern militaries try very heavily to get around this basic fact of human psychology with highly conditioned responses to the situations involved in wartime. None of those situations, though, involves peaceful civilians, hence why you need a sociopath (who does not feel the emotions and does not have the reactions that would inhibit our hypothetical soldiers' willingness to fire on civilians) in order to commit mass atrocity. A sociopath or someone who has been driven to sufficient levels of exhaustion and stress, i.e. examples in the Vietnam war.

The dehumanization of immigrants and non-white people means that there's no reason to believe that there will be any hesitation on the part of the military to kill them, regardless of their "normalcy". Not that I'd expect there to be as much normalcy as you believe. Those guys who murdered the people of Haditha were nice normal patriots who would never sociopathically slaughter people and piss on their corpses. Didn't make a single difference.

As above, no matter how vilified the "enemy" is people still have trouble killing them. Not to mention that this extreme "dehumanization" has managed to be remarkably quiet everywhere I've ever been and in everyone I've talked to. Maybe not as good as evidence as really necessary to be convincing, but I'm sure others could weigh in as well if they've seen differently. From my experience, we're still looking at a minority (soldiers with weapons in the wrong place at the wrong time under officers willing to allow them to fire on civilians) of a minority (those who are in the mental situation required to actually fire at the civilians).

When not being shot at, they're regular human beings who decided to take a job with the military.

Regular human beings, just with a religious devotion to certain snack foods and a propensity for enriching games that include banging their heads into things.

When did we start talking about football players?

[RedKing]

@MSH: Bro....dial it back a notch. (And when *I'm* the one saying dial it back a notch, that should tell you something). I have a lot of extended family in the military. My family has a long and quietly honorable history of military service. None of them were trigger-happy killboys. MOST of the military aren't trigger-happy killboys. And the military has done an admirable job, imho, of finding and removing those killboys from the ranks (or at least steering them to Marine units).

Haditha was the consequence of Marines who had been in-country too long, with a lax chain of command who were being pressured to deliver results, instigating a "whatever it takes" mentality in the ranks. I've never been a fan of the Marine Corps precisely for the reason that we groom them (and they have happily adopted the persona) to be "the sharp tip of the spear", the wild dog, the Action Hero, the whatever-trope-you-want-to-call-it. And that has a lot of drawbacks in peacetime or really any situation that is not an actual combat mission.

But what we've sent to the border are not Marines.

[Dunamisdeos]

IIRC, the last study I read on that subject showed that less than 30% of soldiers can be counted on to reliably fire their weapons back at an enemy. As above, that is indeed "fire back in retaliation". Additionally, while the idea that murder cannot be driven by insanity is ridiculous, I don't think insanity can be attributed to the whole of the deployed National Guardsmen if they open fire on civilian refugees. Haditha was a revenge killing.
 
However, the fire-ratio data was gathered almost 100% via interview with soldiers. While this does not make it unreliable in and of itself, it does lack physical evidence. While it is accepted as reliable in most circles (even influencing military training, who employed effective countermeasures against the "problem"), it's unfortunately not truly conclusive.

If our National Guardsmen actually open mass fire on those civilians as the worst-case scenario suggests, there will be absolutely be a global reckoning. This wouldn't be the same as the murder of 25 civilians during a time of war, or even the genocides in Africa. We would be talking about a modern-day Kristallnacht-level event.
 
Also:

It is expected the Pentagon and US Northern Command will amend the current document detailing the rules governing the "use of force" on the border mission.

Uh, how, please? In what way. Specifics.

[Trekkin]

We would be talking about a modern-day Kristallnacht-level event.

That may well have been Stephen Miller's sales pitch to Trump about it, along with the rally round the flag effect of an invasion with real shots fired, however trumped up. Trump wants the bigly win in 2020 and the shiny military things, Kelly's as stratocratic as ever, and Miller just wants a white ethnostate with borders marked in the blood of people of color. There was no way they were ever going to do anything else.

[misko27]

IIRC, the last study I read on that subject showed that less than 30% of soldiers can be counted on to reliably fire their weapons back at an enemy.

This is related to an annoyingly persistent but misleading claim by Brig. Gen. Marshall. The American military spent literal decades chasing after a 100% engagement rate in the field of Killology, but the claim itself is suspect as all hell for a variety of reasons, as that NY Times article will tell you (including the fact that when he died, historians found his research data to be at least in part made up), and even if it were true it would say very little about combat under different circumstances (can't pretend to fight enemy when you have a sword and shield and are fighting in formation, for example; it also makes little sense when applied to Napoleonic combat). The simple fact is when you ask soldiers in peacetime about how much they wanted to kill their fellow man, they're going to vacillate, they're going to say a lot of things which aren't necessarily true, etc.

Killing isn't new. And if US troops really do have low levels of engagement, it's a problem of US troops and not soldiers in general. To say otherwise indicates a profound lack of interest in or care about the situations and experience of soldiers across the world and throughout history, who fight for many things and for many reasons and with various levels of commitment.

[Folly]

If our National Guardsmen actually open mass fire on those civilians as the worst-case scenario suggests, there will be absolutely be a global reckoning. This wouldn't be the same as the murder of 25 civilians during a time of war, or even the genocides in Africa. We would be talking about a modern-day Kristallnacht-level event.

But would the slaughter of a group already branded as violent invaders really be that much of an escalation from stealing infants from their mothers and never returning them en mass, which is where we currently are?

[Madman198237]

It's actually a well-documented phenomenon from the Civil War as well---many, many trees were shot all to pieces on battlefields...but only above head level. Soldiers were intentionally aiming over the enemies' heads instead of actually firing at them. Also noted from the Civil War were the multiple-loaded muskets, some of which were probably loaded like that by accident, but most of which were most likely intentional ploys by soldiers who didn't want to fire but didn't want their officers to see that they weren't loading with the rest of the soldiers (when muskets fire its entirely impossible to see if an individual is firing with the group, but it's possible to see if someone's not reloading, etc.)