I've been pondering a comment I made apropos of Jim Webb's election some days back, and the meaning of the Second Amendment to our constitution. Here it is in its entirety:
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.
We have a modern issue with militias, in Iraq, and it may be useful to compare the situation there to the American Revolution in understanding the nature of gun rights and armed groups with respect to security and sovereignty. More on the flip.
Why did militias form in Iraq?
Because we were not able to provide security to their "free state".
And, because they could: Iraq, even before the invasion, was the most highly-armed society on the planet, and since we've now lost track of millions of small arms, we lost control of ammo dumps full of explosives and higher-grade weapons in the early days following "Mission Accomplished", and we've been unable to contain arms shipments from Iran and Syria, there are more guns per person in Iraq than there are cars per person in the US.
The stronger the sectarian violence becomes, the more the Iraqis realize we're a paper tiger when it comes to providing security. This is not the fault of our military, which was never designed, trained, nor equipped for this task. We've squandered any chances we had to bring in third parties that do have this kind of expertise, to the point where the security issue is now rapidly becoming a multiparty military conflict again. To think that we in turn would be able to train an Iraqi security force, when we can't even do the job ourselves, seems strange.
No, the idea of a militia, if you look at American History, is the idea of a well-organized and well-regulated armed force with a common purpose. In the colonies, the militias were organized originally because there was no standing British Army in the Americas in times of peace with the European powers, leaving the colonists on their own -- for better or worse -- when they came into conflict with Native American peoples, which happened a lot since American colonists did not choose to abide by the King's treaties with the Indians in a lot of instances.
To put this in more modern terms, my ancestors were organizing to put down "foreign fighters" -- the Indians, the French, later the British and Hessians -- from their perspective. They were willing to engage in internecine warfare -- "sectarian strife" -- against their own people, the Loyalists, who remained loyal to the authority of the foreign occupier, even though they were otherwise indistinguishable from the people we call our founding fathers.
The Massachusetts militia became one of the precipitating causes of the US Revolution. The whole expedition to Lexington and Concord was designed to seize arms caches, and thus to defuse the threat of armed rebellion. The colonists' hands were forced: it was either rebel then, or rebel never, once the British had seized our arms.
All that said, militias, after hostilities broke out, became poor second-rate soldiers compared to the nationally-organized and professionally-trained continental army. This was in part due to the localized and often unprofessional nature of militia organization. Militias are people's armies, and are an ad hoc solution to emergency problems. That, in turn, is why when our founders passed the second amendment, they so carefully worded it to emphasize both the fact that militias must be well-regulated (a fact seemingly lost on the NRA), and specificially mentioned the purpose of such gun rights as being to the security of the free state. They are not individual rights; they are a collective right, one clearly subservient to the need for order. That's why, say, the modern-day Michigan militia are not at all in the spirit of the Minutemen (nor are the modern-day Minutemen) because they specifically operate outside the regulation of the state, or they at least strive to. They do so because they perceive a threat to their liberty, albeit a misguided one. No, the modern militia in the United States is the National Guard, under state control ostensibly, but increasingly federalized.
Why is Iraq in chaos?
Because those militias are not regulated by the state, they are regulated (sort of) by unelected warlord leaders. There is no scaffolding of the state, because the militia leaders don't have any respect for the power of the Iraqi government.
It's all right there in the second amendment. Of course, understanding the context for the second amendment might help. It was written by people who used militias to eject a foreign military power while fighting a civil war. People like George Washington, aided by friendly foreign fighters such as the Marquis de Lafayette and General Pulaski. The British government, it should be noted, called the rebels "terrorists" on more than one occasion and threatened summary execution to the leaders of that particular rebellion.