The militias should be smacked down hard, and violently if necessary. The justification is based on the basic politcial theory of a Monopoly on Violence.

Max Weber said in Politics as a Vocation that a necessary condition for an entity to be a state is that it retains such a monopoly. His definition was that something is “a ‘state’ if and insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in the enforcement of its order.”[1]

According to Weber, the state is the source of legitimacy for any use of violence. The police and the military are its main instruments, but this does not mean that only public force can be used: private force (as in private security) can be used too, as long as it has legitimacy derived from the state.