Our Guard now works for the crown

You can use all the facts, logic, and historical citations you please in trying to persuade a pond frog to change its tune. It’s not likely to do much good.

That’s pretty much the situation we face every time a mindless fan of unlimited government power over an unarmed populace surfaces to recite the “militia catechism” drilled into his or her dozing head by some card-carrying socialist schoolmarm, years ago.

Another one rolled in, last week, from e-mail land.

Boiled down, it goes: “The Founding Fathers said the people have a right to bear arms to form a militia, but years ago the militia was replaced by the National Guard, so people don’t need to bear arms for that any more. Maybe you can still have a hunting rifle, but all that Second Amendment stuff is out of date now because of the militia being replaced by the National Guard.”

Ah, if only the rest of those mettlesome constitutionally guaranteed liberties could be dismissed by merely reciting some memorized bit of rhetorical claptrap, instead of going through all that cumbersome “amendment” business.

Give them time.

First, for the record, many state constitutions — including Nevada’s — guarantee the right of the citizenry to keep and bear arms to defend themselves as well as the state. And the 14th Amendment also bars the states from infringing on this right of U.S. citizens — an amendment enacted specifically to prevent local authorities from instituting any kind of expensive and cumbersome “licensing and registration” scheme, targeted at allowing rich white guys to keep their fancy long guns while systematically stripping poor black folk of the kind of easily concealable weapons that prove most convenient in urban areas — that is to say, precisely the kind of “gun control and registration” schemes our racist police and legislators cheerfully impose on us today, primarily to keep the uppity Negro in his place, with the full blessing of the “enforce the current reasonable restrictions” gang over at the National Rifle Association.

(The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has been busy in Carson City this spring, promising hell to pay if anyone meddles with their “Blue Card” system, under which they’ve been known to arrest people for possessing handguns simply because the police never got around to entering registration cards in their own computers. Even state Sen. John Lee, D-North Las Vegas, says “I’ve heard they’ve got registrations sitting around in boxes over there that they haven’t had the time or money to get entered.”)

The Bill of Rights grants no rights. It merely informs our government masters that they may serve only so long as they are restrained from infringing these rights. Revoke the Bill of Rights, and it’s not the rights that would disappear, but the central government’s last claim to legitimacy.

That said, the Second Amendment’s operative clause — “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” — is in no way dependent on the introductory clause, which merely explains “why.”

It doesn’t say, “So long as the majority of statist schoolmarms shall agree that we still need a well-regulated militia …”

Not that the introductory clause is out of date. It says: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” … and it still is.

Not to the security of a would-be tyranny, mind you. Citizen militias are anathema to tyrants. You only need an armed citizenry — the founders made it clear a true “militia” consists of the whole body of adult citizens, possessed of every type of arm of military usefulness, and practiced in their use — to secure the people in “a free state.”

The founders identified a “special militia” as something else entirely — something to be guarded against most diligently. A “special militia” tends to be a band of uniformed men answerable to the central government — “the crown,” in the language of the founders.

If circumstances led the people of any state to decide it were time to declare their independence from a central government grown too careless of its constitutional bounds — too meddlesome and high-handed by half — how would you tell the real militia from the special militia?

The real militia, being the people, would most likely take up arms against the crown, as it did from 1775 to 1781, and again in the South from 1861 to 1865. The “special militia” would be more likely to take orders from the central government, going door to door and disarming the local citizenry, as it assaulted and disarmed the little old ladies of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, leaving them helpless in the face of the city’s roaming and lawless thugs (www.youtube.com/watch?v=-taU9d26wT4).

On May 9, Defense Secretary Robert Gates rejected a proposal to let the governors of the states command active duty National Guard troops responding to natural disasters.

In a typically ornate Washington Kabuki, Gates told Congress he’d decided to reject three of the 23 changes recommended by an independent commission seeking ways to improve coordination of the Guard during emergencies — but declined to name which three. “Two defense officials familiar with the matter” then proceeded to tell The Associated Press, on condition that no one reveal Mr. Gates had just whispered the answer into their waiting ears, that allowing the governors back into the chain of command was one of the three proposals the secretary has rejected.

This has practically nothing to do with hurricane or tornado relief, of course, and almost everything to do with recent Democratic initiatives to get the governors of the several states to step in and order their respective units home from Iraq. They’re doing this not because it would be likely to work, but merely in hopes of confusing, distracting, embarrassing and isolating President Bush, in hopes he’ll make further mistakes that would improve Democratic electoral hopes at the small price of the lives of a few hundred more disposable U.S. troops and the further bolstering and encouragement of our implacable Muslim foe.

Talk about “keeping your priorities straight”!

As a matter of constitutional law, I believe Secretary Gates may well be wrong. No war having been declared since we won the last constitutionally authorized conflict in 1945, it’s not clear the president has any authority to mobilize the Guard and send them anywhere overseas, in defiance of the governors of the states.

But such an argument would be relevant only in a country where the written constitution still had any de facto limiting effect on the undertakings of the central government, of course. How silly of us.

The point, in the real world, is that the National Guard is now entirely answerable to Washington. It forms part of the army of the crown, and the crown no longer feels the need even to retain the convenient myth that these are “state” troops, helping to preserve any level of state sovereignty by offering any counterweight to the overwhelming power of the central capital.

The National Guard “replaced” the citizen militia?

Sure. The same way Caesar and his legions “replaced” the Roman republic.

Ribbet. Ribbet.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of “Send in the Waco Killers” and the novel “The Black Arrow.” See www.LibertyBookShop.us.