idea: bring back Well Regulated Militias
so i was reading another thread, and had an idea that may have been more of a brain fart, but i figured i'd bounce it off folks here since we appear to be debating small arms ownership and the 2A again anyway.
instead of messing with the 2nd Amendment, adding new point-of-purchase regulations, or waiting for caselaw to change, maybe the answer lies in what's already there in the first clause: the Well Regulated Militia which is supposedly necessary for the security of a free state. well, apparently our free state has become insecure.
back in the frontier days, or so i'm told, militia service was mandatory across a wide range of ages. minorities and women were restricted but that was then. maybe it's time to re-create a mandatory citizen militia (other than the National Guard, perhaps overseen by the National Guard) which trains and drills regularly (but not too often, like one day a month), and in the absence of direct threats can be called up to help with things like natural disasters much like the National Guard, or maybe simple things like helping to maintain park trails.
i'm thinking, and this is completely unfounded speculation on my part, that this could be helpful in reducing firearms accidents due to poor maintenance and storage practices, providing some much needed assists in shoring up our crumbling national infrastructure, but most importantly, giving people an opportunity to get to know their neighbors. if someone is dangerous or unstable, maybe that will become apparent through the course of mandatory service and they can get the help they need. plus, people who might be prone to dangerous activity because they're lonely and unconnected would have at least one day per month where they could fit in and try to achieve something with their community.
just thinking, maybe this whole thing could work out like it's already written in the Constitution, if we made the initial clause of the 2nd Amendment meaningful again. comments?
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"Well regulated" did certainly mean "well drilled" and "well trained," but it was a locally-organized self-defense force. If attacked, a community or a state could protect itself without calling up an army. After all, there was no standing army.
The "state" wasn't federal; it was one of the several states.
And they were entirely voluntarily for the most part. In some places they were mandatory, from what I understand, esp. in times of danger.
The training wasn't necessarily in close formation drills, but in basics. For a lot of what you say, state-owned firearms would be sufficient. It wouldn't squash calls for more "regulation" in the modern sense of "government prescribed rulres and requirements".
Note that "well regulated" could also mean "well equipped," however, so the core of the 2A is still there: You have a right to firearms because that's going to be the weapons you as a militiaman would use. "Well-trained" presupposes "well equipped." And that's the undoing of "reinterpreting" (lic. "rewriting"
that particular amendment under anything like an originalist view.
Of course, if we go full-blown po-mo we can say the words are free to vary as we write them anew each time. Of course, that works both for and against us, but we are staunchly originalist as the occasion demands when it comes to rewriting through reinterpretation laws and the Constitution.