Is city within it's rights to block military recruitment of it's residents under the age of 18?

I don’t like the idea of recruiting until age 18.
I know two guy friends who joined up, and have come to regret it.
Kids don’t get all the consequences, their brains aren’t developed enough to make serious long term goals and projections most of the time.

So, recruiting young kind of pisses me off.

I think the city is well within its rights. As long as the residents are under 18 they are still “minors” in the eyes of the federal law and therefore any recruiting can and should be restricted. In this country we want to limit what movies you watch until you’re at least 17, but we still feel that we can actively recruit you to join the military? That’s just insane to me. If you can’t be trusted to watch a certain type of movie, you can’t be trusted to make informed decisions about whether or not you want to join the military.

How would the city go about being able to enforce a mandate such as that one? According to military.com’s website, you can enlist in the military at 17 years old (with a parents permission) as seen here. It says nothing about the parents having to get permission from the mayor or city council before allowing their offspring to join up and go save the world.

Their legal argument is that the US signed an international treaty to ban military recruitment of children, so the municipal efforts are grounded in the prevailing authority of the international treaty.

so either the military law is bull shit or the movie law is bull shit lol. It is an interesting question, I don’t know what the federal law says about military recruiters ability to go and recruit who and at what age, but naturally that law would over ride any state or city law. Now on the issue of if they should be recruiting people under 18, which really we are only talking about 17 year olds cause thats the youngest you can join, (and need a parents signature to do so) I have mixed feelings. I don’t think its wrong to inform youths of their future options they have after highschool, especially when that option is a respectful opportunity in the military which could also become a career. On the other hand it is very easy for these recruiters to become predatory because these young kids don’t know much better and don’t really understand the consequences as well as say someone in their 20s might.
I think I will stick with the status quo on this one.

In our town this ban is carried out by the school district. Parents must sign numerous permission slips at the beginning of the school year that control all sorts of access to students. This includes whether a list of grades can be posted with the student’s name being on the list, whether their winning goal can be released to the press, whether they can be in photos or videos taken by school personnel and published in official school publications, and whether their address can be released to various folks who might want it. This includes universites, scholarship organizations, and, on a separate form, military recruiters.

Thus, if a parent does not want recruiters to contact their child before the age of 18, the parents say so on the form and the child’s name and address are not released when recruiters come asking. OTOH, if parents don’t mind, they so state on the form and in due course literature starts showing up in the mail box about armies of one and being all one can be.

Like this?

I live there.

I like this idea. I don’t know if it is within it’s legal rights or not however.

When I was a Junior in High School the Military came to my school. They were administering the ASVAB test (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery). They told all Juniors to go down to the Cafteria. They didn’t tell us what it was for. Then they locked AND guarded the doors. You could only use the restroom with an escort. They literally forced us to take this Military Aptitude test so they would know who to call and recruit. Of course at the time I thought this was perfectly normal behavior. Not until many years later did I realize that this is supposed to be an optional test.

(by the way I scored horribly except on my decoding where I got a 99%)

To me, that is scary. Many people under the age of 18 do not have it together enough to think critically about whether or not they want to join the Military. I think they should be able to seek it out themselves but not be actively recruited until they are a proper age. That is my two cents.

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