There’s no justification for how self-styled defenders of the Second Amendment defaulted facing abdication of the guarantee of the right to “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”
A proper defense of the Second Amendment must defend it in full. Not by halves.
The first clause of the Second Amendment must be held as sacrosanct as, per the Heller case, the uninfringeable personal right to keep and bear arms, lest the entire bundle of rights to arms be weakened. We must not let leftists pull the rug out from under us by blithely ignoring the Second Amendment’s first clause, thereby setting an insidious precedent.
Joining or participating in a well-regulated militia, state-chartered or auxiliary to the National Guard, reporting exclusively to the elected state governor, without age limitation or other arbitrary restrictions, confers honorable status. It will provide a way to issue taxpayer-funded weapons and ammunition to its members, provide training, drilling, discipline, and the legitimate exclusion of violent criminals and those dangerously unstable. As well it should. School systems themselves can and should provide one of the vehicles for ensuring a populace well trained in the military arts and sciences a militia must know.
Restoring the right to a well-regulated militia protects the letter and spirit of the Second Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny. Doing so also will expose the hypocrisy of those who hypocritically claim they are not against gun ownership, merely against so-called “gun violence,” a concocted term designed to belittle the honorable place firearms hold in American history.
Switzerland had universal Army service and a gun culture as great as America’s. Having the equivalent of a well-regulated militia cut their crime rate by 90% compared to ours while it served in good order. The left’s resistance to well-regulated militias would hoist it on its own petard, its hypocrisy—their purpose being not reducing criminal misuse of arms, but eviscerating a major provision of the Bill of Rights—clearly revealed!
We fully support the right of the law-abiding to keep and bear arms for self, family, and home defense. We fully support the right of the law-abiding to keep and bear arms to hunt. That said, neither the ancillary purposes of personal defense nor hunting were why the Second Amendment was put into the U.S. Constitution.
“A well-regulated Militia
is indeed necessary to
the security of a free State.”
The purpose of the Second Amendment was to create a balance of power—a bulwark against a tyrannical federal government. Even the denialist Washington Post, publishing historian Noah Shusterman, is forced to admit that:
“Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called a well-regulated militia ‘the most natural defense of a free country.’ His anti-Federalist critics agreed with the need for a citizens’ militia, writing that ‘a well regulated militia, composed of the Yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people.’
Conservatives and originalists like us don’t airbrush words out of the Constitution. Ignoring plain constitutional language is a reprehensible but familiar left-wing tactic. The Second Amendment, in its fullness, recognizes that a well-regulated Militia is indeed necessary to the security of a free State. We have lost sight of this at our grave peril.
The very dangers that have assaulted us—from Dr. Fausti and his cohorts from the federalized health-care plague commissions—are all the proof one needs to see that, without countervailing force at the state level, federales have retracted our rights to assemble, worship, speak freely, travel and act as we would as free citizens. It is time for that to end, and well-regulated state-based Militias, as contemplated by the Founding Fathers in the critical first half of the Second Amendment, are the obvious solution.
A proper defense of the Second Amendment must defend it in full. Not by halves.
Demand and assemble the constitutional right to a well-regulated militia!
Reprinted with the permission of the authors Originally published in the June 2021 issue of the JPFO Bill of Rights Sentinel.
Ralph Benko is a member of the New York Bar, nationally published columnist and co-founder and chair of The Capitalist League. He was a deputy general counsel for the Reagan White House and worked with two other White Houses and the Congress.
Rachel Alexander is a lawyer, nationally published political commentator and is the editor and founder of Intellectual Conservative. She previously served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Arizona and corporate attorney for GoDaddy.
