That goes to the important distinction between the /legal/ duty to respond to an official call-up, enforced by penalties such as fines or imprisonment, and the /social/ duty to defend the community. The two kinds of duty, the first deriving from the constitution of /government/, the second from the constitution of /society/, define two different subsets of the population, which I call the /mandatory/ militia and the /general/ militia, using the term to refer to those engaged in defense activity. The first is a proper subset of the second. People in the Founding Era often loosely used the same word to sometimes refer to the first, sometimes to the second.
However, there is a social duty to respond to a not necessarily official call-up that is enforceable by exclusion from protection or ejection from the community. As a duty, militia is the duty that defines the social contract, and as such precedes government. The authority to issue a call-up is a threat, and the duty comes with awareness of that threat, no matter who might become aware. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Joe Olson and I pointed out in our A2A amicus brief that ratification period > States knew of militias of one -- members of unorganized militias -- and > wanted them armed. The militia statutes commonly exempted broad swathes of > the populace -- sailors, ferrymen, judges, gov't officials, sometimes lawyers > -- from the duty to be enrolled, mustered, and drilled. But the statutes > *didn't* exempt from from the duty to be armed. The rationale was presumably > that there might come a day when they needed every man, and the unorganized > ones might be untrained but at least they'd have a gun and equipment. > -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Constitution Society 2900 W Anderson Ln C-200-322, Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001 www.constitution.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
