[This post also appears here in the op-ed pages of 14jun22 Union.]

George Rebane

In his 10jun22 ‘Read it yourself – ‘A well-regulated militia’’ Union columnist Taylor Carey seems focused only on the interpretation of the nation’s leftwing anti-gunners.  The Left has always held that the Founders' intention for the Second Amendment was that members of the local militias were to be unarmed until their government decided to assemble them and issue guns from the local armory.  That was and is the only mode of regulation that makes sense to the big government, command/control progressive.

Private possession and ownership of guns is not necessary in a well-regulated and organized collective because the government will fulfill all functions of internal security and external defense, arming trained citizens to augment the standing LE and military only as and when the leadership determines that the need arises.  Being at the mercy of armed criminals or the insane until, or if, LE arrives is just the price people must pay to live in a civilized society.  Your personal safety is the responsibility of the collective, and your home is definitely not YOUR castle.

And perish the thought that either the state or its LE cadres go rogue.  In the socialist ideology there is no provision for such an eventuality, no matter the abundant historical evidence to the contrary.  A centralized state under the leadership and administration of educated elites dedicated to the proposition of their interpretation of common good, that benefits everyone equitably, there is no provision for such roguish contingencies – by definition, the state is always fair and just, and as such, brooks no challenge to its power to organize and administer society.  Revolt and revolution by an armed populace in the embrace of a “rabidly corrosive cult of individuality” is “inimical” to such governments that deliver and sustain “ordered liberty” according to Mr Carey.

However, based on their education and experience, our Founders had a markedly different concept of a well-regulated militia.  Their concept of a militia was based on the notion of a rapid response force of armed citizens that would serve a spectrum of functions from defending the hearth, through opposing a rogue government, to repelling invasion by a foreign enemy.  All households with willing and able-bodied men and women would possess firearms that equaled or exceeded the capability of the then standing military.  (Our colonists also owned the more deadly, rifled long-guns decades before they became standard military issue.)  With their personal weapons the citizens would regularly assemble into appropriate tactical units to train.  For those not owning a gun, the local government would maintain an armory.  And these structured local units would also be organized into higher echelon units when the need arose to field a more substantial force.  That is the well-regulated militia provided for by our Constitution.

Today’s National Guard units are “state-based military forces that become part of the reserve components of the US Army and Air Force when activated for federal missions.”  They do not replace the citizen-based militias of the Constitution, since they make no provision for not infringing on “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms”.

During the Revolutionary War and our western movement, such well-regulated militias served the nation and its far-flung communities countless times.  Foreign nations have never given second thought to invading the United States, for they know that America can instantly field well-armed armies of literally millions of citizen soldiers to counter any force a would-be foreign enemy could marshal.  And within our borders, our elected governments have always considered their well-armed constituents when making public policies that border on the rapacious and draconian.

Today we are ideologically polarized with half promoting, half opposing the ongoing ‘fundamental transformation’ of our nation into a socialist state.  The Second Amendment’s gun rights issues have exposed the two sides and their widely-disparate objectives for the future of America.  I hold my lance with the Founders who bequeathed us a Constitution that constrains government, and allows us citizens the means of violent redress, if necessary, to preserve that legacy.  Those who stand with Mr Carey, have forsaken that legacy and put their faith in the tender mercies dispensed by the all-encompassing state.

[15jun22 update]  Most liberals are intellectually stunted.  The comment stream under the Union’s online post of this commentary (see link above) continues its years long revelatory role on the difficulty in communicating with the Left.  For as long as I have read the online Union, I have seen the total disconnect between liberal readers commenting under a conservative column.  When you cut through the usual hip-level vituperation, you find that they didn’t understand a word of the author’s proposition or apologetic – nothing.  And then we come to some attempts at logic to stitch together their counter arguments – oh my.

Over the years as an avid student of economics and economies, I came to an understanding of the dismal deficits the Left and collectivists in general have in their misunderstanding of both economics and human nature.  Their historically abysmal ignorance has been spelled out in detail in the works of Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Freedman, …, and many fine living economists whose recent prognostications of the Obama/Biden policies have been right on the mark, and whose counsel to the contrary has been studiously ignored by the Left, to the detriment of all.

Today Bumblebrain Biden has screwed up America’s economy beyond recognition, and the worst is yet ahead of us as long as he and his handlers remain in power.  This administration has expanded the meaning of ‘butt stupid’ to new frontiers with EVERYTHING they have touched.  (Here is the latest idiocy emanating from the White House in the form of Biden now threatening oil companies for not increasing their refineries’ output of gasoline.) It is in this context that we examine the output of our leftwing neighbors, today the unrepentant supporters of Biden’s Bring Back Blight policies.  Thus endeth my anti-collectivist tirade du jour.

My intent in disclosing an alternative form of ‘well regulated militia’, the kind our Founders experienced and prescribed, was to show that if there is one alternative form of militia to that upon which the Left is fixated, then it’s highly likely that there are other alternative forms which I did not outline.  I just showed the art of the possible, and to a thinking person that is all that is needed to make the case.

The main connection that the Left misses in the argument that a ‘well regulated militia’ must be the kind that grants the citizen the right “to keep and bear arms”, and as ensconced in the 2^nd Amendment, which right “shall not be infringed.”  The 2^nd Amendment is an individual right, not a group or collective right.  And as such, an individual can only ‘keep and bear’ something that is in his possession.  The state keeps its armaments in an armory, but interpreting an individual forced to keep his arms in an armory is a pernicious play on words.  The individual then does not possess such a kept firearm – recall that you own something only to the extent that you can dispose of it as you will.  All other definitions of private property are specious and advanced by charlatans.

And there is no such thing as a group right to bear in a regulated militia or standing military unit.  In time of national need all states retain the power to mandate the bearing of arms, not as a right but as a duty and responsibility of citizenship.  To keep and bear arms is therefore a distinctly personal right which our Founders saw as doing double duty in serving both the will of the collective and the will of the individual.

All of this is beyond the ken of collectivists who cannot conceive of private citizens protecting themselves and their families, and also at their own volition gathering together to resist a government turned rogue.  And that is why the twain shall never meet, and why almost all conservatives are leery of weak-kneed Republicans who support red flag laws that can be capriciously invoked and imperiously carried out.  Red flag laws now form the most reliable stepping stones paving the road to comprehensive confiscation of guns.

[21jun22 update]  The above post in The Union solicited over 100 comments, all but two from leftwingers who were definitely not students of American history besides displaying some more serious cognitive deficits.  In a more comprehensive response, a Mr Dick Sciaroni wrote a column taking my arguments about well-formed militias to task.  Needless to say Mr Sciaroni suffered from similar deficiencies.  I answer him in a letter to The Union that follows –

In his 21jun22 column Mr Dick Sciaroni limits the 2^nd Amendment, arguing that in our nation’s  founding and the establishment of its republican government, “it defies reason that (the Founders’) focus would include condoning a revolt against that very government.”  Were Mr Sciaroni to expand his historical studies, he would quickly discover that it was exactly that focus which inspired, nay demanded, the inclusion of the “right and duty of the people to alter or abolish a government that acts against their common interest and/or threatens the safety of the people without cause.”

The Founders were learned men and students of Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Johnson, et al who taught the ‘Right of Revolution’ against governments gone rogue.  Our nation’s birth came about through the exercise of that right against its then government gone rogue.  History is replete with numerous justified revolutions against governments turning against their people.  Our Founders were very aware of that and enshrined their sentiments in our Declaration of Independence – “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce (the citizenry) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

Our Constitution contemplates and provides for two distinct ways to change our government – an orderly process through amendments and constitutional conventions; failing that, then through armed revolt with the means provided the citizenry through the 2^nd Amendment.  The Founders were neither hubristic nor naïfs when they gave us “a republic if (we) can keep it.”  They were sufficiently wise and humble to know that they had not created the perfect government incapable of going rogue, so they provided us, under law, with the ultimate means of redress.