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“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”

The first clause has always been a bit of a mystery, but any thoughtful student of Latin, (the aging altar boys on the Supreme Court probably forgot or never understood their Latin) would recognize the gerundive construction. This succinctly expresses the fitness or necessity of its subject to the rest of the sentence. The Latin gerundive creates a kind of polarity that contrasts or creates tension between one phrase and the other. Latin uses this all the time and those of us who translated a lot of that language got “that old gerundive feeling” both in translation and in how we would write English if we tried to write poetry or sound like Shakesphere.

Think about how the first clause contrasts with the second in the following sentence; “The weather being bad, we decided to stay indoors”. This sentence sounds stilted to modern ears but we all understand it to say “Because the weather was bad…”. Those of us who have retained that old gerundive feeling would normally construe the first phrase of the second amendment as “Because a well regulated Militia”, or “In light of the fact that a well regulated Militia (or army) is a necessity for the State,….” in modern language. The Founding Fathers had that old gerundive feeling and used it to express economically and accurately what they wanted to say.

The other key word used in the amendment is “Arms”; the founders did not say “guns”. Arms are used by soldiers to bully people and to kill enemies. As a parallel issue, Letters of Marque and Reprisal in the constitution allow for arming private merchant ships so that they could be used for war. The Founders had no problem entrusting Arms and the means of waging war to its citizens. Using guns for protection against robbers or for hunting was not the purpose envisioned in the second amendment. The use of Arms that the Founders envisioned were of course by frontiersmen against hostile Indians, the English and the French. But most of the Founders had also been at war with the King of England and had themselves needed to obtain and use arms. They were nervous about the government that they had just created and clearly meant that the people retain the means to rid themselves of this new government if it became as obnoxious as the King of England had been.

That last sentence being central to the intent of the Second Amendment, you must not compare King George III to President Biden lest you be visited by the FBI.

Now you get that old gerundive feeling.

...Militias Replaced by Full-Time Government Police and Centralized “National Guard”

Needless to say, this model of American militias is long gone from the imagination of nearly all Americans. Modern-day journalists and scholars have been hard at work attempting to connect militias, past and present, either to slavery or to fringe groups and vigilantism. Moreover, many Americans now regard the idea of privately controlled bands of armed men with trepidation and fear.

As the size and scope of taxpayer-funded bureaucratic agencies grew throughout the nineteenth century, private volunteer militias were deemed increasingly unnecessary and undesirable. The late nineteenth century was a period during which states and the federal government went to great lengths to end the old system of locally controlled militias, and this was topped off by the Militia Act of 1903 which largely ended state autonomy in controlling state military resources as well. By 1945, the National Guard was well on its way to becoming little more than an auxiliary to the federal government’s military establishment, although some remnants of the old decentralized system remained.

When it comes to urban environments, these militia were in many respects replaced by today’s state and local police forces, which unlike the volunteer militias are on the job full-time and enjoy immunity and privileges far beyond what any militia member of old might have ever dreamed of having. Rather than private self-funded militias called out only occasionally to quell riots and uprisings, we have immense, taxpayer-paid police forces with military equipment, SWAT teams, and riot gear to carry out no-knock raids (often getting the address wrong).

The old militia system was by no means flawless, but this switch to a more centralized bureaucratic system is not without costs of its own, both in terms of dollars and the potential for abuse.

Moreover, as has become increasingly apparent in recent years, National Guard troops and local police forces are clearly inadequate to provide safety and security for private homes and businesses. Half of the nation’s violent crimes remain “unsolved” as police focus on petty drug offenses rather than homicides. Meanwhile—as happened in both Ferguson and Kenosha—National Guard troops focus their protection on government buildings while private businesses burn.

The dominant shapers of public opinion would have us believe that volunteer groups of armed men must be regarded with horror. Yet it is increasingly clear that the institutions that have replaced the militias of the past still leave much to be desired.