What kind of democracy disarms militias?

[underpants]

All this talk I hear about how they need to disarm the militias in Iraq doesn't add up to me.

Our founding fathers thought it was so important that they made it the first REAL amendment in the Bill of Rights.

See:

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.

It directly mentions militias for crying out loud!

It has also been a staple of one of our major political parties for decades so how is it that it is the first thing they abandon when spreading democracy to the middle east?

This just isn't right.

[jobycom]

1. Militias could overthrow tyrants

Tyrants aren't big on being overthrown.

[tk2kewl]

14. A great Ben Franklin quote somewat modified by the game of telephone

that is the Internets:

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

[HereSince1628]

2. Um. That's _well regulated_ militia's

It seems many of the militias in Iraq are rather less than following regulations.

[ashling]

3. First REAL amendment?

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.


These 'militias" are neither well regulated nor contributing to the security of Iraq.

And what is this claptrap about "the first REAL amendment"in the Bill of Rights?

[underpants]

4. .

:sarcasm:

[ashling]

5. Did I mention

that I'm a little slow today?

:blush:

[wallwriter]

6. Excuse me, but the first REAL Amendment is this one:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. But that's all just silly, unimportant stuff, that can really get in the

way of running the country.

There are only two amendments that are worth a damn - the guns one and the state's rights one. The rest is just liberal politics.

[enigma000]

8. and where were you when the Iraqis were writing their constitution?

Probably on some anti-war march or posting on DU. You abandoned them in their time of need.

[underpants]

9. Maliki never returned my emails

:grr:

[enigma000]

13. LOL

:)

[The Magistrate]

10. Militia, Sir, Means Different Things In Different Contexts

In the eighteenth century, the term meant simply a populace in arms, that could be levied into state or national service in emergencies of civil disorder or war.

In the context of a country with a weak state structure and a badly divided populace, the term means free-lance armed forces acting as governing bodies within particular areas, setting aside the authority of the government and arrogating to themselves the normal prerogatives of the state. It is a mark of war-lordism, and precursor to civil war, as well the sustaining mechanism of both these unsettled, and unsettling, conditions of national life.

[underpants]

11. I don't see that in the Constitution

all I see is "militia"

:hide:

[The Magistrate]

15. In Our Constitution, Sir

Many of the "esses" look like "effs": it is a creature in many ways of the time of its drafting. In the late eighteenth century, there was a lively debate in political and military circles on the efficacy of national armed force based on a professional standing army as opposed to one based on a population in arms. The men who drafted the Constitution fell firmly on the latter end of this debate. Their concept of militia was, loosely speaking, all able-bodied men of the country, or the state, or some locality, a pattern deriving from old practices of levying up fighting men in the medieval period, and even earlier among the north European tribal societies, whether Norse, Germanic, or Celtic. The key to understanding their ideas on the matter is that this ancient pattern was a thing summoned to muster by the ruling authority, and not in any sense of the word a private organization. They did certainly feel that a miltia on these lines would hardly be a body that could be called out to suppress itself, so to speak, and thus would be a poor instrument for any governent bent on action generally unpopular with the people of the country, but that is a different thing than a private armed body existing independent of government authority. That latter is what the term has generally come to signify by the modern day: bodies ranging from the armed elements of political parties to the assemblages of armed fantasists in the Idaho hills are what people generally understand the term to indicate. The National Guards of our several states are the real inheritors of the Consttution's "militia" terminology, being the out-growth and descendants of the old state militia bodies of the nineteenth and late eighteenth centuries. The other practical inheritor of it is conscription, this being merely a formalized and somewhat limited equivalent to the older practice of officials calling the able-men of a community to arms as a militia.

[Infinite Hope]

12. The gov't disarms "terrorist" militias here in the U.S. too...

Nothing new.