MFP Commentary:
As a long standing member of the state sanctioned Missouri Militia, I find that just like the general public, militia members, as a rule do not understand the Constitution nor the principles that this country was founded upon. Ironically many are past members of the one organization that the militia is there to protect us from if necessary: A standing army as the founders called it. The US military. None seem to realize this. Most have a strange infatuation with the US military, and want to emulate it regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever for the militia to do so.
They sell the Militia to the public, and to it’s members as something that it primarily is not! They sell the milita as “Disaster Relief, State Defense & Community Service”. I have never heard anyone delve into what they mean by “state defense” because most don’t even know what it means, and those that might, don’t want to go there. We have a politically correct militia that IMHO is close to useless because they do not even know why they exist, nor understand our founding documents.
Most also do not recognize the other standing army that is in our midst, one that I think the founders would be very alarmed about. We now have a standing arm of soldiers that wear blue uniforms, and proudly proclaim that they are “order followers”. Just like their brothers at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi Germany. They will, and brag about it, enforce any “law” that the psychopath in the legislature commit to paper.
We were never meant to have either standing army. A free people should not be lorded over by standing armies. As envisioned by the founders, you and I, the militia, are and were “the police”. And during times of peace we were the only military on the continent. (Spare the Navy which is authorized by the Constitution during times of peace)
Spoiler alert: This is the heart of the this article IMHO:
In his book Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802, Richard Kohn writes:
“No principle of government was more widely understood or more completely accepted by the generation of Americans that established the United States than the danger of a standing army in peacetime. Because a standing army represented the ultimate in uncontrolled and controllable power, any nation that maintained permanent forces surely risked the overthrow of legitimate government and the introduction of tyranny and despotism.”
~MFP
While many defenders of private gun ownership recognize that the Second Amendment was written to provide some sort of counterbalance against the coercive power of the state, this argument is often left far too vague to reflect an accurate view of this historical context surrounding the Amendment.
After all, it is frequently pointed out that private ownership of shotguns and semi-automatic rifles could offer only very limited resistance to the extremely well-equipped and well-armed United States military.
It is often, therefore, just assumed that the writers of the Second Amendment were naïve and incapable of seeing the vast asymmetries that would develop between military weaponry and the sort of weaponry the average person was likely to use.
Was the plan really to just have unorganized amateurs grab their rifles and repel the invasion of a well-trained military force?
The answer is no, and we know this by looking at the wording and reasoning behind the Second Amendment. The text, of course, reads “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Gun-rights advocates often fixate on the second half of the amendment, claiming that the phrase about a militia is just something that provides a reasoning for the second phrase. Many opponents of gun control even suggest that the only phrase here of key importance is “shall not be infringed.”
The Second Amendment as a Guard Against a Standing Army
Looking at the debates surrounding the Second Amendment and military power at the end of the eighteenth century, however, we find that the authors of the Second Amendment had a more sophisticated vision of gun ownership than is often assumed.
Continue reading “Why We Can’t Ignore the “Militia” Clause of the Second Amendment”
