Plenty of things cause harm to citizens. Somebody has to weld, somebody has to produce paints and batteries, the list goes on. All these things - including a standing army - are useful for the public, and it’s important to have professionals who handle it without forcing anybody who likes these things to volunteer to do them.

In the west we generally have professional armies, made of volunteer soldiers who chose to be sent wherever the country’s administration deems appropriate - and in working democracies the administration makes their decisions according to the popular will. If a foreign entity is posing a material threat I am very much free to think and express my opinion that we should let our professionals handle it, this is how things work in the present. To suggest that I should be enlisting because of this opinion is moronic.

Not that it’s any less moronic to suggest that military endeavours should be decided by popular vote: in representative democracy we vote people who we deem competent to form governments to run our countries, I certainly don’t think I can handle military affairs better than the ministry of defence. Direct democracy in general is a horrible idea, it’s not implemented anywhere relevant for good reason. But I digress.

The point is: the idea of “if you want the country to do it you should do it” is stupid and reeks of demagoguery.

Why are we talking about conscripts? Modern (western) militaries have largely phased out conscription, and in case of war it’s extremely unlikely that you or I would be given a rifle and sent anywhere.

This is not to say we are (or should feel) extraneous from our armies, they are our means of protection and should be used wisely - just that arguments that involve regular people getting “picked up” don’t have any place in places like USA or Western Europe.

I don’t know where you are from, naturally things change in different situations - but the context here was a proposition for the American constitution.