Preface 

"The Insurrection Act of 1807 is a federal law governing the ability of the president of the United States to deploy military troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, and rebellion. The general purpose of the Insurrection Act is to limit presidential power, relying on state and local governments for initial response in the event of insurrection. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of the United States Army and Air Force (extended by executive direction to the Navy) for routine law enforcement. Actions taken under the Insurrection Act.

"The Insurrection Act is brief. It allows the president, at the request of a state government, to federalize the National Guard and to use the remainder of the Armed Forces to suppress an insurrection against that state's government. It further allows for the president to do the same in a state without the explicit consent of a state's government if it becomes impracticable to enforce federal laws through ordinary proceedings or if states are unable to safeguard its inhabitants' civil rights.

"The language of the act currently dates to 1871, when the Third Enforcement Act revised it to protect African Americans from attacks by the Ku Klux Klan.” (Wikipedia)   

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Readers… The relevancy of the above preface is that President Trump has suggested that he will invoke the Insurrection Act and order the deployment of the U.S. military to American cities: "I am mobilizing all available federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting, to end the destruction and arson and to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.” Obviously, he doesn’t get that the Insurrection Act is designed to check using our military against its own citizens. We fought the American Revolution against the British for doing the same exact thing.

VoteVets.Org reached out to me and other military veterans and National Guardsmen on our opinions regarding the National Guard being activated for protest policing in cities following George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police.

The Army National Guard by defined mandate may be called up for active duty by the state or territorial governors to help respond to domestic emergencies and disasters. In that context, it is a state militia, as opposed to the District of Columbia Army National Guard, which is under the authority of the President, rather than state governors. The present unrest clearly falls under the emergency declaration. How it is utilized to support the protecting of lives and property, while allowing for citizens the right to assemble and protest peacefully (this includes non-violent civil disobedience, which is the hallmark of our democracy) requires astute implementation. 

When I rotated from my Marine unit in Vietnam to the States, May 1969, I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, and received riot control training on the streets of Jacksonville, NC. I remember how odd it felt to be practicing tactics to crowd-control American citizens. A year later, I was viewing the TV reporting of the Kent State (Ohio) student war protests gone awry, resulting in 13 injured, 4 dead. Knowing how raw I was on returning to the "world" from Nam combat, where the lines of enemy and friendly were clearly drawn, I realized how important strategic restraint was in situations of policing our own citizens. I reflected on growing up as a person of color and watching the Civil Rights protests for equality on television — the firehoses, the dogs, the baton beatings, resulting in injuries and deaths. The misuse of policing power, which has sparked this national crisis in our cities must be addressed in the present and going forward into the future. But clearly the National Guard must support the efforts to restore order at the invitation of state governors. Going beyond that, as Trump envisions, is a whole new can of worms and a whole new country that can’t be good.