Politics, Rights, Guns The Great Political Dysfunction by Potowmack

In all the cascade of news reporting and comment on the tragic event in Aurora, Co., no one has observed that the Parker court (2007) concluded that we can have “registration ... for militia service if called up.” There is no contradiction of that in the Supreme Court rulings. Registration is the only way guns can be effectively regulated. That is where policy making begins. Registration, that is, accountability to a governing authority, accountability to the very legitimacy of a governing authority, is the one point of policy the gun lobby’s childish political fantasy cannot accommodate and what the NRA works hardest to defeat. That childish political fantasy is that the purpose of all those gun in private hands, outside of accountability to a governing authority is to maintain the “armed populace at large,” a collection of sovereign individuals who made a treaty based on no more than word of honor and promise of good faith and not a government which in the words of Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers was about “POLITICAL POWER AND SUPREMACY” (caps in original). Militia call up resurrects the original civic purposes of military obligation and military preparedness. Militia duty in the colonies, the early Republic, the Constitution, the Second Amendment and the Militia Act of 1792 was conscript duty. The Militia Act required gun ownership, required militia officers to maintain inventories of privately owned weapons and report them to the state governors and the president of the United States.