Posts Tagged militia

FiveThirtyEight Hypes Threat Of Militias

From FiveThirtyEight:

“There is no private militia that is lawful. Period. Full stop,” said McCord, whose group at Georgetown has identified laws on the books in every state that prohibit some or all private militia activity. But these laws often go unenforced, and that’s partly because in practice, it’s not always obvious what crosses a line. A law in Virginia, for example, bans weapons training but only if that training is intended to be used in “a civil disorder.”

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The Reason For The Militia

From American Greatness:

In an obscure but important footnote to the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wonders what would have become of the Soviet terror if the citizens of Russia had armed themselves with hammers, axes, pokers—anything—so that arresting officers of the NKVD would have had to worry whether they would survive each night. The most powerful tyranny in the world could not have stood up against such action. Instead, tens of millions of Russians submitted meekly to the state, one by one. Why?

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Bureaucrat Militias and the Threat To Freedom

From Law and Liberty:

In addition to the administrative agencies that we would expect to have militias, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, the Bureau of Prisons, and such, some unlikely federal bureaucracies actively train and use militias: IRS, Social Security Administration, Department of Education, Consumer Safety Products Commission, Bureau of Land Management, Department of Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a host of other agencies, both large and small. Sensational stories about the Environmental Protection Agency raids to enforce the Clean Water Act have surfaced in recent weeks; the Education Department has used its militia to terrorize citizens suspected of defaulting on student loans; and a few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with the militia from the Fish and Wild Life Service made a spectacular raid on a Miami business suspected of having violated the Endangered Species Act.

These raids were full-scale military operations to enforce administrative agency regulations. Government militias have become so active in the past several years that the rate at which they purchase ammunition for training purposes has caused widespread shortages in civilian markets—at times it has been almost impossible for civilians to purchase the most popular calibers used by government militias. What should we make of this dramatic expansion of the administrative state?

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Right To Self Defense Knows No Bounds

From Reason:

Last Saturday in Louisville, Kentucky, about 300 armed members of the NFAC (Not Fucking Around Coalition), a self-described “black militia” based in Atlanta, had what the Louisville Courier-Journal called “a tense standoff” with about 50 armed Three Percenters, which the paper described as a “far-right…militia.” While the incident, which ended without violence, could be seen as yet another sign that the country is descending into 1968-style chaos, it was also a striking illustration of the Second Amendment’s enduring practical and symbolic importance that scrambled conventional stereotypes about the right to armed self-defense.

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The NRA And Memorial Day

From NRA’s First Freedom:

When dedicating the Gettysburg National Cemetery in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln honored those who gave their “last full measure of devotion” to defending American freedom. A few years later, Americans began to commemorate “Decoration Day” on May 30 as a time to visit the graves of those who had given their lives during the Civil War. Later, Decoration Day became Memorial Day, honoring the sacrifices of all American soldiers.
Just a few years later another institution was created that is closely related to Memorial Day: the National Rifle Association.
Founded in 1871, the NRA began by dedicating itself to the safety of American soldiers. Because of the efforts of the NRA over the ensuing century and a half, many more American soldiers have been able to accomplish their missions and to return home alive.

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George Washington: Illegal Militia Founder

From Reason:

Without formal legal authorization, even from the Continental Congress, Americans began to form independent militias, outside the traditional chain of command of the royal governors. In February 1775, George Washington and George Mason organized the Fairfax Independent Militia Company.

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Slate Concerned About Right Wing Violence, Silent On Left Wing Violence

From Slate:

Though they vary across the states, the anti–private army laws target the same basic phenomenon: forming armed groups not answerable to civil authorities, providing paramilitary training for use in civil disorders, and falsely assuming police or military roles. The constitutional provisions and statutes can form the basis for injunctions prohibiting members associating together while armed or setting up training camps, restrictions on public events like rallies, and even criminal prosecutions.

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The Wide Militia Movement

From Reason:

Two more factors muddle the picture even more. One is the white nationalists of the alt-right, who sometimes draw on the same pool of potential recruits as the militias, though relations between the two movements are frequently frosty. The other consists of the armed “counter-recruitment” organizations that imitate the militias’ iconography while advocating leftist (usually anarchist) politics.

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Academic Paper Re-examines The Second Amendment

From David T. Hardy:

This article proposes third approach, which is better founded in the historical record. The militia clause and the right to arms clause are completely separate concepts. They have different origins, one looking back to the Renaissance, the other forward to the Enlightenment. In 1787-91 they largely had different constituencies: some Americans were concerned that the new Congress would neglect the militia, others that it might disarm the people. For most of this period, drafters of State declarations of rights, or of proposals for a Federal bill of rights, chose either to praise the militia as an institution, or to guarantee an individual right to arms, but never both.

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Opinion: Arm Everyone

From PJ Media:

This has to stop. I’m proposing that we campaign to reduce gun violence, and to meet our constitutional duty, by requiring that every member of the militia — which, of course,  we’ll redefine to eliminate the obvious sexism and make it all adults — must own at least one long gun, one handgun, and 1,000 rounds of ammunition for each, or pay an annual $1,000 tax for failing to do so. As I pointed out the last time I brought this up, the Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare makes it clear that it’s constitutional to require people to buy a product, so that shouldn’t be a problem. And, federal law would override the local laws in rogue cities like Chicago that prevent members of the militia from fulfilling their constitutional duty.

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The Militia Clause

From Mises.org:

Fearful that a large federal military could be used to destroy the freedoms of the states themselves, Anti-Federalists and other Americans fearful of centralized power in the US government designed the Second Amendment accordingly. It was designed to guarantee that the states would be free to raise and train their own militias as a defense against federal power, and as a means of keeping a defensive military force available to Americans while remaining outside the direct control of the federal government.

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Second Amendment History

From National Review Online:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. In 1791, the Founding Fathers placed into the U.S. Constitution a set of ten amendments that we refer to collectively as the “Bill of Rights.” Among them was an innocuous measure designed to protect state militias against federal overreach. Until the 1970s, nobody believed that this meant anything important, or that it was relevant to modern American society. But then, inspired by profit and perfidy, the dastardly National Rifle Association recast the provision’s words and, sua sponte, brainwashed the American public into believing that they possessed an individual right to own firearms.

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Heller Was The First Step In Repealing The Second Amendment

From The Federalist:

The Second Amendment was repealed, in effect, by Heller’s majority opinion. The opinion went beyond questions raised in the case and laid out a rationale by which Congress, states, and courts could ban the private possession of many offensive and defensive arms today and all such arms of the future.

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Veteran: It’s A Citizen’s Duty To Be Prepared

From The Truth About Guns:

Guns are a tool. I used them in the military to accomplish our mission and most of all, to protect myself and those around me. Law enforcement officers use the same tools for the same reason. As an American citizen; self-defense is a primary consideration. Civilian ownership of firearms also serves a mission. That mission is to be prepared to form the Reserve Militia to back up the Federal and State government’s forces. Without civilian ownership of military-type firearms in common use, their capability as a backup to the military is severely diminished.

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Machine Guns On Trial

From Ammoland:

A panel for the United States Third Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a district court ruling and sided with the government against a man who was authorized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to manufacture a post-1986 machine gun through a trust, only to have the permission rescinded and his property confiscated. In doing so, and by ignoring founding intent behind the Second Amendment, the panel ruled the right of Americans to own militia-suitable firearms can not only be infringed, but that it’s not even a right.

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