Tell that to the Vietnamese. And many Iraqis and Afghans.

Yes, on paper the rules of engagement for the US military in peacekeeping mode is significantly more restrictive than the police with much fewer protections. In practice? That guy you double tapped from behind was reaching for his gun. That house you blew up was full of insurgents. And so forth. That footballer you popped because you got confused? Heroically died in combat.

The National Guard are the remnants of the militias that the US used to depend on and that the second amendment was actually about. The idea of civilians with military training who can be raised in times of great need and… what many (most?) Global North countries have as their default.

Many of them are former active duty military (e.g. The Army) who wanted to keep pulling an extra paycheck and benefits after becoming civilians. Others are just dumbasses who got tricked by the “Just spend two weekends out of the year training and you too can have an ice sword that kills dragons” nonsense.

Their actual role is… questionable. Sometimes they get pulled in to help with natural disasters but they have no meaningful training outside of holding guns to scare people and maybe building sandbag walls. According to a climbing buddy who had to interface with them back during Hurricane Katrina… they actively made everything worse and got in the way constantly and she had to unofficially allocate resources to protect the Guard that could have otherwise been spent helping rescue those in need. But, Support The Troops™ and all that. Back in uni, they were the jackboots who were called out any time people “rioted” (theoretically because a sports team lost or it was Spring Break. Mostly because kids started protesting) and their job was to look intimidating and bully/beat on anyone who was out past curfew.

A not insignificant number were also sent to Iraq/Afghanistan when the US Military realized they couldn’t keep stop-lossing everyone who was dumb enough to sign up for the Military proper.

In their day to day civilian life? They are basically just normal people. Some work in tech, others food service, and MANY are small town cops because that also lets them carry a gun. The key unifying factor is they all will act like they are heroic veterans who killed fiddy men and make damned sure to flaunt their military credentials to board planes faster or to get a discount at the hardware store.

Like a lot of things modern military, it is worth looking at the Invasion of Ukraine. The professional soldiers (former standing military and PMCs from around the world) make up the forces that actually take ground or are deployed for operations where skill and discipline are needed. The civilian population that were conscripted and given a gun man the trenches because all that is really needed there are bodies to send bullets down range and soak up the ones coming back at them.

The National Guard are very much the latter.

Considering that I was poking the guy I replied to who couldn’t resist talking about how

the M4A1 just feels good to shoot

in a thread theoretically about using the national guard as militarized police?

Maybe… get some glasses?

I’ve increasingly noticed that Lemmy has a LOT of gun nuts. The “Kids who grew up playing call of duty and want to make like Swayze and scream ‘wildcats’” crowd make sense since that is an increasing number of progressives and internet leftists.

But I’ve increasingly noticed the other flavor of “moderate” who are rabidly guns’ rights activists but who also are adamant that nobody is allowed to criticize the military and doing so is going to let the fascists win. And… I am increasingly noticing them coming from the sh.itjust.works instance. This thread used to be crossposted to their /c/conservative? Not sure if it still is and I just don’t understand UIs. And yesterday their /c/politics mod went batshit insane over people not standing for the pledge or whatever and was banning anyone who wouldn’t tell (let’s be real) him what state they live in.

Never noticed anything too bad from them in the past but they are rapidly getting to dot ml levels of crazy and might even reach dot hexbear if this keeps up.

Considering I specifically said I wasn’t aware of outright being unarmed (and most examples are from closer to 20 years ago than not) and that the doctrine in LA was exactly what I described?

1. I never made a statement of fact
2. My speculation actually ended up being accurate from a quick google

So I am just going to assume you are part of the crowd coming here from the /c/conservative board losing their mind over people not properly glazing the military.

Emotional Support Assault Rifles?

Yeah. It refers to the gun nuts who can’t even see a mention of a firearm without talking about how good it makes them feel to use one as their hand slides lower and lower down their pants.

Those jackbooted thugs are people in a military uniform holding guns and enforcing the will of a fascist leader.

I don’t really give a fuck what they do the rest of the year. They could even watch Anime for all I care.

How do you plan to accomplish anything with them poised against you?

Make it clear that they are The Enemy. They don’t get a “thank you for your service” while they are beating on a civilian. Make it clear that they are with us or against us. Rather than letting them win until they decide they don’t want to anymore.

Y’all spent so much time playing call of duty that you would be the ones telling the guard marching you into the gas chamber that it wasn’t their fault and chastising the granny who spit on them.

For anyone buying this bullshit: Pretend it is about cops. If you speak out against cops then how are they ever going to end up on your side? So just keep crying and whining while the real heroes give the cop sexually assaulting someone in the back of a cruiser some gatorade.

You’re right. Fucking idiots. We need to support the jackbooted thugs who are actively working against us because maybe, just maybe, they’ll change their mind at some point. But only if there are no consequences for them.

A thug is pointing a gun at me on behalf of trump? I don’t really give a fuck what color their shirt is or whether they have a punisher skull or a thin blue line flag.

They are the enemy until they actually fucking side with The People. And “Hey, they aren’t actually shooting at you… yet” is not siding with The People.

Well, at least in LA, they had bullets https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/amid-la-protests-officials-rules-force-national-guard/story?id=122670457

So don’t worry. They are just one pull of the charging handle from being able to shoot you in the head

Had not heard of being issued empty guns. Seems like said military would push back drastically because it is dead weight that makes them worse than useless in a crisis.

What IS common is to have doctrine of unloaded guns. Sometimes that is stated as having an unloaded magazine in the gun but having full mags on their body so it is a quick swap when they want to kill someone. Usually it more just means that they are told to not chamber a round (i.e. squeezing the trigger won’t make it go bang but they are one quick hand motion from being ready).

Which… tends to line up with most “peace keeping” operations and behavior outside of active combat zones. It drastically reduces negligent discharges but they are like 2 seconds from being combat ready at any moment in time. It is just the gun nuts who insist that all guns need to be carried with one in the chamber at all times because they think they are going to have to quickdraw on that purple haired girl at the Starbucks at any moment.

It is meaningless and they still have more than enough bullets to make Kent State look like nap time at a preschool.

Yes but these are the talking points the NRA give out that “liberal gun owners” also start regurgitating. The idea that their Emotional Support Assault Rifle (ESAR for short) is safe and important because it isn’t the standard issue weapon of the US military.

Its why you see so much “an M4 is not an AR-15” stupidity (that firearms experts and “guntube” continue to call idiotic). Which is an outright lie because the M4 (and M16 before it) is literally a military designation for a specific configuration of the AR-15 platform (actually a family of designations because M4A1, M4A2, etc). Pretending that it somehow stops being an AR-15 because it has select fire capabilities is like pretending it stops being an AR-15 once you put an optic on it.

And a lot of that boils down to one of the biggest poison pills in what little gun control the US has (which I’ll refer to as the NFA for shorthand). The idea that the big danger of privately owned firearms is automatic fire is an outright lie when militaries around the world actively discourage soldiers from using automatic fire on anything but a machine gun (and said machine gunners are trained to fire in very controlled bursts, if not single shots, even when suppressing an enemy position…).

And it is especially hilarious because most modern ESARs are based on weapons systems that were specifically designed for military use and where re-enabling the holy automatic fire is the work of a dremel and a trip to the hardware store.

As a tangent. Funny enough, the past decade or so has seen a very large rise in Emotional Support guns that are actively NOT suitable for any modern combat (still great for slaughtering kindergartners though).

The rising cost of intermediate ammunition (e.g. 5.56/.223) because everyone panic buys it every time the world catches on fire has led to a huge rise in “pistol caliber carbines” which are just military rifle platforms (e.g. the AR-15) but chambered for handgun ammo. So… reinventing submachine guns but with the appropriate attachment points for all the tacticool shit.

And then you have the Keltec Specials which are borderline novelty guns designed to get some publicity at a convention and then be sold to rich people and folk who need an ESAR but cheaper. The “joke” being that if you got one of those designers even slightly drunk they would outright say that anyone who thinks those will hold up under even slightly adverse conditions is a moron.

The National Guard? If they are given a gun by logistics then they are being given ammo. This isn’t Enemy at the Gates (or VERY specific and isolated cases on the Eastern Front of WW2). So expect LOTS of discount green tips on the East coast in the near future.

The deputized proud boys? They just bring their own.

AR-15s ARE weapons of war. They (more specifically the AR-10 which was more or less refined based on feedback into the AR-15) were specifically made to meet general calls by militaries around the world with the intent of becoming the standard issue infantry weapon for as many armies as possible. The focus on automatic fire (especially in the NFA…) is particularly disingenuous as the vast majority of militaries “strongly discourage” troops from ever firing in anything other than semi automatic because it is a waste of ammunition.

The problem isn’t that we have jackbooted thugs who are armed with weapons that they can’t get from a local walmart.

Also, just pure pedantry but: M4s ARE AR-15s.

If data has handling requirements it 500% should not be something people are storing on their “personal” devices.

I personally hate the idea of storing corporate data in “cloud” storage, but MS et al have gotten approval from many governments to do exactly that. So if that is your corporate data store? Then that is where it goes. And if someone is making a new document with additional restrictions then they better damned well have training on how to pick which folder in onedrive it goes into.

“too soon” and “don’t you know we are facing a fascist regime and the Black Panthers achieved everything by having guns and not at all by running one of the best PR campaigns the world has ever seen and focusing on contributing to communities in manners commonly associated with socialism? You fucking racist bootlicker”

At the end of the day, a bunch of dipshits want their emotional support AR-15s and don’t care how many people die for it.

Not sure on the policy for this (and too lazy to read through the TOS) but the usual standard is:

You have read only access to your data in some form for N months. Sometimes individual, sometimes grabbing the whole dump. If you haven’t renewed your license within N months, that data is deleted (but not really).

MS Office is increasingly only sold as part of “Microsoft 365” which already involves paying for cloud storage and copilot and the like.

20 seconds of googling gets me the pricing page for their family (which I think is the same as single seat personal?) plan which is 130 USD a year for

    For one to six people
    Sign in to five devices at once
    Use on PCs, Macs, phones, and tablets
    Up to 6 TB of secure cloud storage (1 TB per person)
    Productivity apps with Microsoft CopilotFootnote1
    Identity,Footnote2 data, and device security
    Ad-free secure email

There may still be some corner case “just MS office” releases that are targeted towards legacy machines in certain regions. But if you try to buy MS Office for whatever reason, that is what you are gonna get.

More children sacrificed on the altar of The Holy Second Amendment.

With my user/increasingly crazy man in the woods hat? Fuck that noise.

With my corporate stooge hat (that is the one that pays for the previous hats)? This actually is a really good idea. Way too often we have people saving documents to their laptops or losing them when they break a desktop enough that IT has to reimage it. Everything corporate should live in the corporate data store by default.

And… at this point, any individual user using MS Office is an idiot who probably also needs that extra layer of protection. Why spend money when Google Drive (which is already cloud native) works just as well? And for those who care about offline use? Get Libre Office where stuff is perpetually 80% as good.