Monday, March 10, 2014

A Well Regulated Militia

Professor Reynolds asks the question in his USA Today column, if a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, are we less secure, or less free?
But although the militia survives in vestigial form in the statute books, as a functional institution, it no longer exists. For law enforcement, the militia has been replaced by professional police, with SWAT teams, armored vehicles and Nomex coveralls; for military purposes, the militia has been replaced by the National Guard, which despite a thin patina of state control is fundamentally a federal military force.
That's a pleasant observation, but I would remind the professor that true militias sprang up in Louisiana during the twin disaster of Katrina and Rita.  Citizen militias formed in places where the government could not reach, to protect life and property.  Militias aren't quite dead yet, although the government wishes they would die.

Still, the professor asks some interesting questions.  Go to the link for the whole article.

3 comments:

Eaton Rapids Joe said...

"You shall not go about spreading slander among your people; nor shall you stand by idly when your neighbor’s life is at stake. I am the LORD." Leviticus 19:16 Sounds like the concept of militia predates the Second Amendment and comes from an even higher power.

-Joe

Anonymous said...

PawPaw,

I've learned that the militia refered to was meant to be the entire body of male civilians, of proper age and physical ability. The term regulated meant well supplied, or equipped. These definitions are easy to document using the published documents of the time of our nation's founding. The free state they insisted on protecting was the peoples' ability to retain their hard won new freedom from any tyrany, from any quarter, foreign or domestic. It would follow that any of the powers that desire to see our freedoms dead, would take the necessary steps to prevent our defending it. It seems the professor makes sort of a straw man arguement by stating the "militia" has been replaced by something else that serves a totally different function. However free we are now is sure to rapidly diminish if freedom's defenders have no functional existance.

Old NFO said...

Yep, folks WILL take matters into their own hands if the .gov doesn't... Katrina being one example both in LA and MS...