# Joining a well-regulated militia in the US. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 20, 2012, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487 "2012-05-20T02:49:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Memoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6bbea6/32.png) [@Memoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Memoe)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/41 "2012-05-22T05:00:51Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > No. You’ve heard of the Selective Service Act? That’s basically the mechanism by which the unorganized militia is kept track of. It’s not something that you can just get ready in a few days. You’re talking about a vast group of people. And you probably don’t want them bringing their own arms. You want standardization. An army where everyone carries whatever gun they feel like is an army that’s going to suffer from major supply problems. Would that be why the NATO round is so popular? ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/42 "2012-05-22T05:06:17Z")
> [@Memoe](#): > > Would that be why the NATO round is so popular? Yes, they were created to be a standardized round for all NATO countries, so that, should war break out, NATO wouldn’t have to worry about having supplies of separate ammo for each country. ---
**Author:** ![Memoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6bbea6/32.png) [@Memoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Memoe)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/43 "2012-05-22T05:07:56Z")
Is it true an .223 can be fired from a AK, but a NATO round can’t be fired from an M-16? Never actually tried it. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 11:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/44 "2012-05-22T11:09:16Z")
The M-16 can fire NATO rounds/ That’s what the m855 ammo is. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 12:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/45 "2012-05-22T12:04:28Z")
> [@Memoe](#): > > Is it true an .223 can be fired from a AK, but a NATO round can’t be fired from an M-16? Never actually tried it. Which AK? The AK-47 and its immediate successor the AKM both fired the 7.62 x 39mm round. These are absolutely not able to fire a 5.56 NATO round. They were in turn replaced by the AK-74 which fires the 5.45 x 39mm round. It cannot fire a 5.56 NATO round, either, though the two rounds are conceptually and balistically similar. OTOH, there have been any number of commercial AK clones that used the 5.56 round, the Israeli Galil (which is a PIP AK) was designed from the beginning to use it, and IIRC a few former Warsaw pact nations now field 5.56 NATO AK’s due to NATO membership or dreams of it. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 12:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/46 "2012-05-22T12:26:13Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > Isn’t the [National Guard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_the_United_States) the “well regulated militia” today? Can’t be. No tricornes. If you haven’t got no tricornes, you can’t go around calling yourselves a militia, much less a well regulated one. Thems are the rules, wot I make 'em up. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/47 "2012-05-22T12:40:54Z")
> [@Memoe](#): > > Is it true an .223 can be fired from a AK, but a NATO round can’t be fired from an M-16? Never actually tried it. Maybe what you’re thinking of is that the 5.56 NATO round is very, very close to the civilian .223; enough so that a rifle chambered for 5.56 can often shoot .223, but not vice-versa due to higher chamber pressure. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/48 "2012-05-22T13:01:39Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Maybe what you’re thinking of is that the 5.56 NATO round is very, very close to the civilian .223; enough so that a rifle chambered for 5.56 can often shoot .223, but not vice-versa due to higher chamber pressure. This idea of AK’s using our ammo, but our guns not using their ammo has a tiny basis in fact. The Soviets fielded a mortar (82 mm?) that was slightly larger than our equivalent. In Vietnam, the enemy was actually able to fire captured US rounds from their Soviet-made mortars. Not that we needed to use captured ammo, but if we had wanted to, the Soviet rounds were oversized for our mortar tubes. Grunts being what they are, that little quirk grew into a myth of Soviet arms in general being able to use our ammo, but not vice versa. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/49 "2012-05-22T13:29:23Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > No. You’ve heard of the Selective Service Act? That’s basically the mechanism by which the unorganized militia is kept track of. It’s not something that you can just get ready in a few days. You’re talking about a vast group of people. And you probably don’t want them bringing their own arms. You want standardization. An army where everyone carries whatever gun they feel like is an army that’s going to suffer from major supply problems. Nitpick: the Selective Service Act would be used if necessary to draft people in the regular US Army- the result of a Supreme Court decision that radically changed the relationship of the militia to the federal government. The Constitution gives the Federal government the authority “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions”. In other words, the militia was originally conceived of as a purely domestic force: short-term, local and defensive. The Mexican-American war and the Spanish-American war were fought by a combination of Army regulars and volunteers. The Civil War was fought on the Union side mainly by recruits who were half-bribed, half-coerced into joining the regular Army: bounties were paid to anyone who signed up for a three-year tour of duty, while militia conscripts served for nothing (though theoretically for a maximum of nine months). Then came World War One: in the hyper-patriotic, jingoistic climate of the time, the Federal government for the first time in it’s history drafted men directly into the regular US Army, under the Selective Service Act of 1917. Along with other Supreme Court decisions that ruled against virtually all opposition to the war, the Court ruled in the Selective Draft Law Cases (Arver vs United States) that the federal government in time of war had an implied power to draft men into the regular Army in order to fulfill the manpower requirements of the war- a proposition that would have astonished Abraham Lincoln when the Union was fighting for it’s very life but never asserted such an authority. It didn’t help that the Supreme Court case was not fought on conservative grounds of strict Constitutional limitation of federal power, but was brought by socialist radicals whose antipathy toward all government authority painted their case in the most prejudicial possible light. Then just before World War Two the government passed a peacetime draft. Any questions about the legality of this were rendered moot by the outbreak of the war; and then the US maintained a draft through the “police action” of Korea, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Thus, by the Vietnam era we had the paradox that people who had voluntarily joined the National Guard could not be sent overseas to an undeclared war, but people who were unwillingly drafted into the Army could. ---
**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/50 "2012-05-22T13:57:00Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Well, they used to be, but nowadays the National Guard is just an extension of the federal military. What? No. The National Guard is still, and always will be, under State authority. > [@Rhythmdvl](#): > > nor, I presume, are soldiers allowed to bring in their own weapons to training (are they really called soldiers? Or is that only when they’ve been called up to do something in a combat zone?). Of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be soldiers? And there are quite a few people who bring their own firearms to drill, albeit simply for show’n’tell purposes. 🙂 > [@Rhythmdvl](#): > > Not closely following gun threads, what is the current sate of Constitutional jurisprudence that avoids the logical implications of posts 2 and 3? That is, those posts (on their own) eviscerate the notion that a private citizen has a right to bear arms. I don’t follow. Why would the National Guard being the militia have anything to do with private gun ownership? The second amendment says “Since States need National Guards, everyone can own a gun.” It seems pretty straightforward to me. BTW, why does it seem like everyone overlooks the word “State” in the 2nd? It’s saying that in order for Georgia and New York to be free, not the U.S., they need militias. > [@IAMIS](#): > > I believe the name rednecks relates the the fact that there are simple people You got that right. ---
**Author:** ![ExTank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/35a633/32.png) [@ExTank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ExTank)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/51 "2012-05-22T14:38:11Z")
> [@Chessic\_Sense](#): > > BTW, why does it seem like everyone overlooks the word “State” in the 2nd? It’s saying that in order for Georgia and New York to be free, not the U.S., they need militias. Well, there’s State, like Georgia. And New York. And then there’s state, like the generic term for a governing body. The second definition is what’s being used in the 2nd Ad. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2012, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/52 "2012-05-22T22:55:24Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > The Civil War was fought on the Union side mainly by recruits who were half-bribed, half-coerced into joining the regular Army: bounties were paid to anyone who signed up for a three-year tour of duty, while militia conscripts served for nothing (though theoretically for a maximum of nine months). > > Then came World War One: in the hyper-patriotic, jingoistic climate of the time, the Federal government for the first time in it’s history drafted men directly into the regular US Army, under the Selective Service Act of 1917. No. The Civil War draft drafted people into the regular, US army, not the state militias. As the bill put it: > [@](#): > > That all persons thus enrolled [by the draft board] shall be subject, for two years after the first day of July succeeding the enrolment, to be called into the military service of the United States, and to continue in service during the present rebellion, not, however, exceeding the term of three years; and when called into service shall be placed on the same footing, in all respects, as volunteers for three years, or during the war, including advance pay and bounty as now provided by law. So the draft was for 3 years, not 9 months, and it was a draft into the US Army, not the militia units. And they didn’t serve for nothing. They got the same pay and benefits as recruits got. > [@](#): > > Thus, by the Vietnam era we had the paradox that people who had voluntarily joined the National Guard could not be sent overseas to an undeclared war, but people who were unwillingly drafted into the Army could. They could. About 24,000 National Guardsmen were called up for active duty, and of those, about 8000 served in Vietnam, along with about 1000 Air National Guardsmen. 97 guardsmen died in combat. It’s true that National Guardsmen didn’t make up a large percentage of soldiers in Vietnam, and that joining the Guard was seen as a “safe” way to avoid going over there, but Guardsmen did go over there and did fight. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2012, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487/53 "2012-05-23T00:22:33Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > No. The Civil War draft drafted people into the regular, US army, not the state militias. As the bill put it: I presume you mean the Enrollment Act of 1863. I was unaware of that, and I’m amazed I can’t find any cite of legal challenges to it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joining-a-well-regulated-militia-in-the-us/622487.md?page=2)