Robert, your newspaper article is interesting . . . but it doesn't say anything about the federal list of those mentally disqualified from buying guns having increased because a whole bunch of vets have been added. It was known before the VA Tech tragedy that reporting of those judged to be mentally disqualified was lagging badly--unlike reporting of felons, which is pretty accurate and up to date. Obviously, following the VA Tech shooting, the states would make significant efforts to make sure the mentally incompetent are reported and added to the federal data base--as they always should have been.
King, it would probably be more accurate to say that there was a significant split in the US population over isolationism versus support of, if not direct involvement in, the war against fascism. FDR himself was certainly in the latter group. Lend-Lease made that clear, and could have been regarded by Germany as an act of war. And the United States had restarted the draft and was mobilizing Reserve forces long before Pearl Harbor. The tank battalion that covered the retreat onto the Bataan Peninsula was a Minnesota National Guard unit that had been activated in 1940, and had been in the Philippines since about February 1941.
