Talk:Constitutional militia movement/draft

Legal and historical rationale
U.S. activists cite law and history, especially from the Founding Era, to explain and justify their aims and agendas:

The U.S. Constitution, Art. I Sec. 8 Cl. 15 & 16, and the Second Amendment specifically provide for a "general" militia system rather than a standing army or professional police, which some of the Founding Fathers opposed as "select" militia not representative of the communities they might have the duty to serve.

Often cited are statements by the Founding Fathers:


 * George Mason: "I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."
 * Richard Henry Lee, Senator, First Congress: "A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms."

A history professor has argued that the right to keep and bear arms evolved from a duty to be armed. Several historians have argued that this duty was as deterrence against crime and governmental tyranny. As militia units they train in the proper and safe use of firearms, so that they may be effective if called upon by constitutionally compliant officials to perform that duty, or, if no official fulfills that duty, to elect their own officers, as was done in the colonial and early republic era.

In Anglo-American tradition, every able-bodied person has the moral duty, and, by law, a subset of them a legal duty, to respond to call-ups to respond to threats, issued by any person aware of a threat, to any one or more persons who may be available in the area. Call-ups enforceable by fines or imprisonment may be issued by the sheriff of their county, governor of their state, or the president of the United States. The threats for which the president may issue a call-up extend only to "to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions". However, state and local officials may also issue call-ups for natural disasters, such as fires, floods, earthquakes, or storms like Hurricane Katrina. Any of these officials, subject to law, may also issue call-ups for organization and training.

In recent years there have also been increasing calls to organize, train, and equip for such threats as terrorism, drug trafficking, and border control. This has sometimes taken the form of focused operations like neighborhood watch, or efforts like the Minuteman Project that first report violations and usually refrain from direct enforcement, as a way to embarrass the government into doing a better job. Others make a broader call for constitutional compliance in general, especially in the courts, which many see as engaged in judicial tyranny.

Some historians argue that the U.S. Constitution presupposed that militia would be the mainstay of defense and law enforcement, and this was the prevailing order in the decades surrounding the adoption of the Constitution. Another supports the concept that the jury is a kind of militia.

Mack Tanner, "Extreme Prejudice," Reason Magazine, July 1995, 43-50, wrote about the movement:


 * To understand what the militia movement is talking about, one needs to understand a bit of federal law. While most of us never think about it--or even know about it--every American male spends 28 years as a member of the militia, whether he wants to belong or not. United States Code, Title 10, Section 311, describes the militia of the United States as consisting of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and under 45 years of age. If we are not members of the National Guard, then we are, by law, members of the unorganized militia who can be called to service at any time by the appropriate legal authority. Any two or more American men can therefore claim to be an association of members of the unorganized militia, just as they might be an association of voters, taxpayers, parents or citizens.

On page 44, Tanner describes activists as


 * The armed, but legitimate, political activists. This is a new phenomenon, at least in this century. These are socially successful people who respect and obey the law, but who are organizing and arming themselves because they fear they may be attacked by agencies of their own government.

Etymology
The term "militia" is derived from Latin roots:
 * miles /miːles/ : soldier
 * -itia /iːtia/ : a state, activity, quality or condition of being
 * militia /mil:iːtia/: Military service

In English, the word "militia" dates to at least 1590 when it was recorded in a book by Sir John Smythe, Certain Discourses Military with the meanings: a military force; a body of soldiers and military affairs; a body of military discipline

The original meaning of the Latin word is "military activity", or, since the ancient Romans had the same people fight crime or respond to disasters, "defense activity". In the idiom of English during the 18th century, the same word would often be used for an activity and for those who engage in it, so "militia" could mean either defense activity or those who engage in it, whether as individuals or in concert with others.

Some confusion arises from the English idiom, which goes back to Anglo-Saxon and got carried over to the adoption of foreign words, of using the same word for an activity and for those engaged in it, with the meaning as activity originally being primary, but slipping into more frequent use of the word in its secondary sense of those engaged in it. Examples of such words include service, assembly, movement, wedding, viking, congregation, aggregation, delegation, march, ministry, court, jury, and hunt.

Most of the leading Founding Fathers were Latin-literate, so they would have known the original Latin meaning, and used it when they read or wrote in Latin.

We can see in their writings and speeches that they often used the word prepended with an article, “a” or “the”, to refer to those engaged in the activity, but at other times they use it without the article. Modern readers are likely to understand that as using the word as its own plural, but the plural of militia is militiae, and if the Latin-literate Founders had meant it that way, they would have said militiae. They were, in that usage, meaning the activity.

Activists consider this distinction is important because if the word means only those engaged in the activity, and is always plural, then militia can only consist of two or more persons, and never just one. However, understood as an activity, then is it clear that one individual can engage in militia, and it follows that self-defense is a militia call-up issued to oneself, to which oneself responds, to enforce the law. When all self-defense is cast into an act of law enforcement, then the legal framework is transformed into what the militia concept requires.

This meaning also comes up in discussing other countries with a militia tradition, especially Switzerland, which the Founders viewed as a model for the kind of militia system they wanted to establish. The militia clauses of the Swiss Federal Constitution are contained in Art. 59, where it is referred to as "military service" (English), "Militärdienst" (German), "service militaire" (French), "servizio militare" (Italian), "servetsch militar" (Romansch), and translated into "servicio militar" (Spanish and Portuguese), all synonyms for "militia" in Latin.

These discuss militia and Switzerland:
 * Constitutional Project for Corsica, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
 * Considerations on the Government of Poland, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
 * Defense of the Constitutions of the United States, Letter XXIX, John Adams
 * Spirit of Laws, Book XIII, Charles de Montesquieu
 * Freedom's Frontier, Ch. 2, Clarence Streit
 * The Law of Nations, Book III, ch. 1, Emmerich de Vattel
 * Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1788, Speech of Patrick Henry
 * The Commonwealth of Oceana, James Harrington
 * Plato Redivivus, Second Dialogue, Henry Neville.


 * Armée Suisse. This book is issued annually by the Swiss government and is sold in most book stores. It contains all things that a citizen-soldier in Switzerland must know. It discusses their rights and privileges, strategy and tactics, equipment and organization and the role of the individual citizen-soldier. The photographs of current equipment are interesting and the accompanying text is fully descriptive. The 1988 edition contains 372 pages of fine print text. Soldiers must buy this booklet out of their own funds.

Some leading activists urge the use of the word consistently only as an activity, asking other activists to test every usage by substituting “defense activity” in the sentence to see if the grammar works, so that the public will also begin using it that way.

Historical antecedents
Movements to establish or strengthen militia and to enforce the "constitution" of the time go back to ancient times, in many countries.

The protests against British abuses of the rights of the American colonists as "Englishmen" involved militia from the outset, and a movement to strengthen it in preparation for conflict with British forces. This movement continued through the American Revolution, led by the Founding Fathers, many of whom were militia commanders.

A movement to strengthen militia against the threat of Indians, pirates, and encroachments by British, French, and Spanish forces from neighboring territories rose to a peak for the War of 1812.

Movements outside the United States
There have been at least two efforts outside the United States in the past that could reasonably be described as constitutional militia movements. The first English Civil War of 1642-46 can be characterized as such. (The militia was already in being for the second phase in 1648-49 and the third in 1649-51.) A prominent one was inspired by Scots like Andrew Fletcher around 1698, but was dissipated by the financial turmoil that led to the 1707 Acts of Union.

There have also been reform movements that were depicted as (threatening) militia by their adversaries. One of these was the Levellers in England during about 1645-49, a faction of reformers that had been allied with Oliver Cromwell but split with him when he refused to make any of their demanded reforms. The leaders of the factions were militia, so it was to be expected that anything they might advocate would be perceived as backed by the possibility that they might resort to force, especially if any of their leaders, especially John Lilburne, were persecuted.

Another such reform movement in England that the established government saw as threatening was a network of groups, one of the more prominent being the Society for Constitutional Information, which advocated, during the 1794-99 timeframe, many of the same reforms that had been advocated by the Levellers. They were not composed, for the most part, of militia-trained persons, nor did they train to the use of arms during their attempts to hold a convention to agree on reform proposals, for which many of them were prosecuted for sedition and treason. However, the militia tradition in England was still strong enough that any reform movement could be seen as an incipient militia movement.

The key to both of these reform efforts is that they perceived that they were advancing constitutional principles that already existed in natural law, even if not yet in the written documents that comprised a kind of "constitution" for England.

Controversy
The controversy deepened in 1995 following the Oklahoma City bombing beginning with an appearance on CNN by former FBI agent Oliver "Buck" Revelle in which he pointed the finger of suspicion on the "militia movement". This was later amplified, after the arrest of Timothy McVeigh, by reports that McVeigh was a "member" of a "militia", without the corrections, that he had been ejected from the only militia meeting he had ever attended, receiving the same attention.

One of the key controversies has been over whether to aggregate almost all groups containing two or more persons with arms training to their use, into a single "militia movement", or, because there many groups with diverse goals, agendas, and activities, to disaggregate them into multiple movements, based more on the way they self-identify than on the ways they may be characterized by outsiders or opponents. One FBI report, Project Megiddo, offered the "guideline: (1) a militia is a domestic organization with two or more members; (2) the organization must possess and use firearms; and (3) the organization must conduct or encourage paramilitary training." On the other hand, another FBI report provided guidance for the meetings between FBI agents and militia activists beginning in May, 1995, in which the FBI differentiated among many kinds of armed groups and distinguished "constitutional militia", which would correspond to their "Category I" or perhaps "category II", and violence-prone groups, which they called "Category IV", with a "Category III" between "II" and "IV".

Possibly related activities or movements

 * Activities or movements with which it is sometimes allied
 * Constitutional restoration movement
 * Fully informed jury movement
 * Gun rights movement
 * Tax protest movement (income tax)
 * Border control movement
 * Ballot reform movement
 * Legal practice reform movements
 * Judicial reform movement
 * Anti-terrorism movement
 * Land rights movements
 * Libertarian movement


 * Movements with which there has been some crossover of individual participants, but that are not synonymous
 * Patriot movement


 * Movements with which it is sometimes confused, perhaps deliberately
 * Christian identity movement
 * Secession movements
 * Anti-immigration movements
 * Ku Klux Klan
 * Racist movements
 * Black Panther movement