I said this when the story first broke and I think it’s important to state again that the whole militia mythos at the core of this fantasy of history was a very dangerous one. It very nearly lost us all of our early wars though we were lucky enough to get a regular army raised each time in the nick of time.

But that’s just it, the whole militia concept, that we could do without a standing Army and defend our nation simply with freemen grabbing a rifle off the wall and marching to the enemy, was a conspicuous failure. It got lots of men slaughtered in the Revolution, 1812, during various engagements of the early Indian Wars (those east of the Mississippi) and during the early part of the Civil War. The myth of the brave minutemen remains strong in certain quarters (see the “Appleseed” rife trainings) but it is myth nonetheless. The volunteers of the Civil War began the process of change from Militia to the modern National Guard because they were given at least some real training before being fed into the meat grinder. This was the model followed by the conscript armies of the US from WWI through Vietnam and, while decidely mixed, the results were still superior to those of the militias.

The only real impact the militia has anymore is that the 2nd Amendment was written around that mythos and there are a whole lot of people who thing they can defend themselves against the government with man portable arms or that the idea of a well regulated militia includes the carrying of concealed weapons (the founding fathers would have only expected criminals to want to do that).