Imagine trying to explain the role of the FCC to James Madison and asking him if it’s in accord with the First Amendment.
I bet they’d be horrified by murderers who were clearly guilty sitting on death row for 20-30 years before being properly executed. And of allowing mentally ill people to roam freely, bugging people for change and using the world as a vomitorium and toilet. And of people not using the bathroom that correlates to the genitalia nature’s god graced them with.
This…
Private citizens avail themselves of guns and ammo. But guns and ammo do not a militia make. Unless you can cite otherwise.
I thought that had already been cited.
Regards,
Shodan
I think the unorganized militia you’re citing is unorganized to the point of not existing. How can you call something an organization when many of the people who supposedly belong to it aren’t aware they’re members or even that the organization exists? What is the supposed function of this unorganized militia? Who are its leaders? What are the responsibilities that arise from being a member? Who can activate it? And, most germane to the thread topic, how can anyone define this militia as well-regulated?
Make that the way just about everybody dresses.
Yes, but however, as I have said, the National gd is now federalized and no longer a Militia.
Are you seriously endorsing the argument that people who own guns are part of the “Unorganized militia”? I gotta be honest, I sure hope you are.
And yet we somehow *do *have both a standing army *and *the Guard. How can that be, except that you’re wrong?
Cite? And not that “unorganized” (and certainly not well-regulated, even if existent) militia nonsense.
To the extent that’s true (and I agree), only militia use is covered by the Second, other uses simply not being addressed and left to statute. That’s how it *was *seen, without serious argument, until the individual-right misinterpretation was manufactured just a few decades ago.
They themselves reversed their decision on having a standing army very shortly after ratification. They’d be horrified at some things, sure, but hardly that.
By reading what they actually wrote, *all *of it and in context, and not by denial or handwaving if we don’t like what it says or doesn’t say.
It *was *accepted as clear for most of our history. What changed, and why?
It is endlessly fascinating to me that so many Republicans are hard core for the people having guns to defend themselves from the government, but at the same time are huge boosters of the United States having a gigantic standing army and controlling the state militias. If you brought the Founding Fathers to today and they saw that, they would think they’d failed; they thought a massive standing army a huge threat to liberty. They would rush back to 1789 and alter the Constitution to prevent that.
That was a close decision, one that they themselves reversed very quickly. The debate is, for better or worse, best remembered for Gerry’s quip “A standing army is like a standing member. It’s an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.”
The US established the standing Regular Army in 1791. There were no major objections raised, and no need seen to amend or drop the Second.
That said, can we drop the “Founding Fathers” term? It implies that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were holy prophets of some kind rather than just men who meant well and did their human best, and were guided by God rather than their own experienced understanding of human nature. The document is not Scripture; they intended that it be amended as deficiencies were discovered through use, and could be tossed and replaced entirely if it got unwieldy - they even added the procedures for doing so. Jefferson famously observed that there ought to be a new one every 20 years or so. Several mentions have been made in this thread of how astonished, even horrified, they’d be to see it today - but the thing that might astonish them the most would be that we’re still using it.
There is a difference in degree, though, between the army that was created in 1791 and what exists today. It was apparent in 1791 that the USA needed some kind of standing army to ensure there existed some kind of continuous line of professionalism, especially after St. Clair’s Defeat. That assumption had already been made about the navy, which for both technical and logistical reasons is a way more difficult thing to raise, and it’s why the U.S. Constitution treats the navy differently.
Even after 1791, though, there remained in American politics a profound aversion to maintaining a large standing army. The USA was not professionally prepared for the War of 1812 and even as late as the Mexican-American war the army was very small. The regular army in 1846 could muster a force of maybe one to two thousand men. The vast, vast majority of soldiers who served in it were militia and hastily summoned volunteers. Going into the Civil War, as I am sure you know, the army remained quite small and was heavily focused on engineering projects and pacifying the West. The hundreds of thousands who joined for the war were almost a different organization, which is why when discussing men’s ranks there’s a confusing range of distinctions between a guy’s regular rank and his “brevet” rank and his permanent rank.
I am sure Thomas Jefferson would have agreed that some sort of professional army was needed, but for much of American history, the idea was that the standing army existed to provide a base of leadership and skill, and that in times of crisis, the bulk of an army would be filled with volunteers and militia. What the USA become in the 20th century where there was ALWAYS an enormous armed forces was absolutely not what they wanted, and was in fact what they feared.
We don’t disagree about that. Yes, Article 1, reinforced by the 2nd, was to ensure that we could put a capable military into action when needed, and the government quickly came to understand a standing core military was needed which could organize and lead and “well-regulate” it. That’s been a common arrangement throughout history. But there’s nothing in that committee-compromise document, begging for amendation, about an individual right *not *related to those uses.
The USA became the dominant power in the world then, both economically and militarily (they’re intertwined), while strengthening its democracy both at home and abroad at the same time. I have never seen a reason to believe they would have *feared *that, although they would have worried about the cost and deplored the many cases in which we have acted from lower impulses.
Well, I don’t think the international order of the 20th century would have been all that comprehensible at all. The results of winning the Second World War would surely have pleased the Framers. I am one hundred percent certain they still would have found the existence of a massive standing army very frightening. They wouldn’t have really understood the modern American attitude towards armies at all, really. Americans in the late 18th century did not, generally speaking, see soldiers as heroes, or armies as forces of good.
Of course, the realities of modern war are different than they were in 1789. Modern wars are fast and have a degree of individual lethality that changes the relationship between economy and military. The weapons needed by even a smaller industrialized nation’s armed forces are complex and expensive beyond the imagining of Washington, Napoleon, or Wellington. Having al all-militia army that bring a lot of the guns with them is just not a thing that will work for pitched battles in 2019; Cletus isn’t showing up for reserve duty in his own Abrams or Raptor. So the vision of having little to no professional army at all is just not realistic now, even if you and I agree the US armed services doesn’t need to be as bloated as it is.
But… the other side of that is to call the Second Amendment into question. Its purpose was primarily the defense of the USA against foreign aggression, and personal firearms are no longer in any way part of American preparation for war.
The Guard is part of the standing army. for the nth time, the National gd is no longer part of the Militia.
What happened is that the USA decided to go overseas during WW1, and thus we needed a standing army to meddle in overseas affairs. This became very helpful in WW2, where we prevented the Axis from winning.
Yes, it’s the unorganized militia, which was (and still is, kinda) the law and has been since the uSA was born. No “nonsense” there.
No, again, the 2nd started out as a bare bones right to bear arms but the “no standing army” faction insisted on the Militia clause.
They did, then dissolved it to a great extent. Actually the uSA standing army was tiny except during wartime up thru the WW2. Read about how tiny and unprepared our Army was at the start of WW1 and WW2.
However, altho a few states still have one, the Militia is now Obsolete. Scotus has ruled that we have a Right to protect ourselves and our homes, just like we have a right to privacy, etc.
So all this argle bargle over “militia” is pointless.
Yes, but except in times of war the Standing army was small and feeble. The FF had no issue with that, as long as it was so small and feeble the various state militias outnumbered it decisively. The point was that the Militias were a counterpoint to the Standing army.
Now we have a huge powerful expensive standing army, and only a few feeble state militias. (the National gd is not a militia)
You’ve said this several times now. Is anyone here asserting that it is?
Many people, read the thread. :rolleyes:
The Dick Act, the Militia Act of 1903, asserted it. That’s also where this “unorganized militia” nonsense started, as a sop to the states’-rights people (there were still plenty of Confederate veterans around).
You can claim it’s unconstitutional if you want, but it’s getting pretty late.
As stated by George Mason, the militia is everyone who doesn’t work for the government. A militia is a group of people that organizes militarily for a short period and then disbands when the threat is over. A militia can be organized by a city, state, or a private citizen.
The function is to fight battles for the country when the need arises.
The founding fathers were skeptical of standing armies and saw the need for an armed populace to serve as a militia in case the government ever became tyrannical and used an army to oppress the citizenry.
As to whether the militia is currently well regulated, probably about one third of Americans own guns and even fewer know how to use them but over 100 million armed citizens is a formidable force. If people saw the government actually becoming tyrannical more people would get guns and learn how to use them. The purpose of the second amendment is to allow that to happen.