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Because an army of mindless psychopathic murderers is a bad way to conduct wars. And releasing them into society when they're done service would be even worse.
This is a legitimate unsolved problem.
It was already pretty hard to train people to be ready to kill and not just ready to boast at the enemy with automatic weapons. Training them back into being normal citizens is something I'm not sure to even be possible.
Not about to say the average jarhead can't be integrated back into society, but fucking with him is a deadly business and likely always will be. Doesn't matter what the law says.
Why not? They are not killing any person they encounter at random. They are killing who they are ordered, when they are ordered, and in a manner they are ordered. Otherwise they're not an army, they are a horde of psychos. Why would it be impossible to order them not to kill civilians?
As I understand, the wacko in question did not even pose an imminent danger - certainly not to the Marine, but also not to anybody else. He disturbed the peace, was stirring shit up and was running his mouth, but he was not actively trying to murder anyone, and especially not Penny. So it's hardly "fucking with him".
Because that's not how it works in reality.
In 1947, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall published Men Against FIre: The Problem of Battle Command, arguably one of the most influential publications in military psychology. In it, he makes the now infamous "ratio of fire" claim that fewer than 25% of men in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. His figures are contested, but the finding itself has been independently reproduced by multiple studies performed by other armies over multiple centuries. And remember we are talking about men that were drilled into operating their weapons and are in mortal danger.
The reason for this remains the object of intense debate, but Marshall most definitely succeeded in convincing people to look into methods of increasing this ratio.
By 1950 and Korea the US Army had started efforts to use B. F. Skinner's newly discovered conditioning techniques to do so.
One of the most famous changes wrought by these programs was the use of human silhouette instead of bullseye targets during basic training as one such conditioning tweak. But it is also one of the least successful.
The increase in the availability of crew served weapons, which provide a sociological pressure to the individual soldier, and the widespread use of artillery which allows for the reduction of the enemy to an item on a map did a lot more to increase the ratio. All these factors and more made Korea an important learning experience for this venture and all the lessons learned would be applied to the extreme in the next war.
VIetnam would see these techniques perfected, and used with great effect.
Desensitization is of course the name of the game here, the level of bloodthirsty rhetoric and celebration of killing in a recruits training was significantly increased compared to Korea and even more significantly so compared to the world wars. Training videos and lectures full of gory details and celebration of the mutilation of the enemy were commonplace.
Conditioning was also greatly employed, to produce reaction without thought. While previously a marksmanship course would have you take a prescribed position while calmly shooting at stationary targets, a similar course for Vietnam would have you standing in a foxhole, wearing full gear, waiting anxiously for a moving target to pop up at random and only allow you a few moments to shoot. That same target producing a satisfying sound when dispatched correctly.
A great emphasis was placed on realism, they went as far as making mock Vietnamese villages complete with livestock and villagers to have the recruits patrol and do mock missions within. All to turn the destruction of the enemy into a reflex.
Of course all this conditioning comes at a cost. The mental restraints we have against killing are there for a reason, and many argue that the atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians as well as the widespread psychatric issues associated with Vietnam vets are consequences of such conditioning.
This is all to say that the idea that destroying your fellow man as something that can be simply be turned on and off and controlled with individual reason is far from an accurate picture.
The distance between an effective soldier and what you term psychopathy is much smaller than I think you realize.
This is most probably what the law cares about. But you're not hearing me if you think that is what matters. Whether it is true or not.
This is a nice theory, but I can't forget living in a country where significant part of the population were in the army - and not in a parade peacetime army, but the army actively engaged in fighting, and still somehow they do not look or act like a bunch of psychos. In fact, the only event that I could describe as "psycho-driven mass shooting" (as opposed to terrorism or combat engagement) that I could remember happened in 1994. Compare to how often these happen in the US, where the proportion of people who seen combat training, let alone real combat, is much lower. According to your theory, mass shootings or murders by veterans should happen very often, and the more people pass combat training, the more they should be perpetrating such events. But this is not what is happening, by which I can conclude your theory is flawed.
It should matter.
I don't see why. Rather the theory would predict that all else being equal vets are more violent and more deadly in their violent encounters than the average. Terrorism being well within consideration here.
Frankly I have no idea of the numbers on that so that's a falsifiable claim right there.
Again you seem to have this weird idea of the only alternative to rational consideration being some fictitious conception of psychopathy. It's just not that simple.
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If this description is accurate, than this would imply that Marines are a much greater threat to their own society than subway hobos, at least per capita. Being gratified by killing and mutilation, and being likely to uncontrolledly resort to it upon provocation, sounds far, far worse than being unable to hold a job and a home or being numbed by drugs.
This goes without saying. Most of what I talk about isn't even required for this to be true.
Fortunately, Marshall seems to have fabricated most of his evidence and that which follows from it thus does not.
I don't follow?
None of this line of argument relies on SLAM's numbers being rigorously obtained. I recall for instance independent British and Soviet reports that came to similar conclusions.
Your recollection doesn't actually count as evidence.
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They are of course trained for other combat activities, and to operate equipment, and survive in the field, and all sorts of other things. They are not much trained in nonlethal combat, occupation enforcement, or policing. They are not meant to be used for that purpose.
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