A view of the second amendment: Militias

As ratified by the states, the second amendment is as follows: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

So where is the “well regulated militia?” Clearly, militias are not encouraged in the present environment. You could say that militias are crowded out by police. But police forces are few relative to the population. If order were to break down, say, due to an EMP attack, the police and national guard could be stripped of transportation and communications. Protection would have to come from a much more numerous and more widely spread out force, a militia. This is a point that is missing from the prepper shows on TV. It is impossible to go it alone in such a circumstance.

What could the framers have had in mind? Their society was one with a frontier. There were dangers on the frontier that could not reasonably be addressed by a police force. But a militia would be just the answer.

The bottom line is that it follows that if there might be an occasion in which a militia is useful, then the population must be armed to some extent. While the Supreme Court has determined that the right of people to bear arms is justified by the use of arms in self protection alone, the language regarding a militia could still be relevant. It seems reasonable that when the police are not readily available to protect individuals or groups, then individuals or groups may protect themselves with arms.

Do people buy guns because they imagine joining a militia at some point? Probably not very many. Primarily, people buy guns to shoot them at ranges, for personal defense, for hunting, and/or for collections/investment. Of course, many gun owners have them for more than one of these purposes or have some guns for one purpose and some for another. But again, very few actually contemplate joining a militia and using guns in the context of militia activities. On the other hand, it would be impossible to form future militias without rather extensive private gun ownership. The reason is that militias will probably only exist if the public sector is substantially disabled so that police forces cease to function. Private gun ownership is necessary under these conditions because the public sector could not be counted on to distribute guns and ammunition from governmental caches.