Who Is the Militia and What Is its Purpose

Who Is the Militia and What Is its Purpose

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: This article was written in 1995.]

    The short answer to who is the militia is every able-bodied man except for a few political leaders. The short answer to the purpose of the militia is to protect the people from their own government and foreign governments.
    The militia is not the National Guard. Congress established the National Guard to serve as a reserve force for the armed forces. The National Guard is akin to the Army Reserve except that it is under the control of the governors of the several states during times of peace (unless the President wants to use the National Guard to enforce federal edicts in a State). Because the federal government can require National Guardsmen to serve overseas, it cannot be the true militia because the Constitution does not allow the federal government to send the militia overseas. Furthermore, federal law recognizes the National Guard, in times of peace and war, as a component of the United States Army.
    The militia is not a collective right. It is an individual right. Historically and legally, the militia is the whole body of the people as individuals.
    That the right to bear arms belonged to the people individually can be easily substantiated by the comments made by the founding fathers:

        Fisher Ames: “The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing government, are declared to be inherent in the people.”
        Zachariah Johnson: “[T]he people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them. . . . The government will depend on the assistance of the people in the day of distress.”
        Thomas Jefferson: “[N]o free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
        Richard Henry Lee: “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”
        Patrick Henry: “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. . . . The great object is that every man be armed. . . . [E]veryone who is able may have a gun.”

Other founding fathers made similar statements proclaiming the right — nay, the duty — of every able-bodied man to be armed. When these men said “the people,” they meant, in the words of George Mason, “the whole people, except a few public officers.”
    The reason for possessing arms is not for hunting or sport. The reason is for self-protection, self-protection not so much from criminals and foreign governments, but from their own government. A well-armed citizenry is needed to prevent a constitutional government from degenerating into a tyrannical government.
    Noah Webster summed up the purposed of an armed citizenry:

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.

    Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong central government, stated the necessity of an armed citizenry:

This [a well-armed and trained militia] will not only lessen the call for military establishments, but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens.

   Obviously, these statements were made in the early days of the country. The people need to become much more heavily armed if they want to begin to match the firepower of the standing army and nullify the corrupt and despotic power of the United States government.
    Justice Joseph Story summed up the necessity of the militia in his Commentaries on the Constitution (1833):

The militia is the natural defense of a free country against foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample the rights of the people. The right of a citizen to keep and bear arms has justly been considered the palladium of the liberties of the republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

If there was ever a time for a well-armed militia, it is now.

Copyright © 1995 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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