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The 2A keeps the government afraid of it's citizens.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Not an American here but doesn't the 2A imply that there is no centralized US army? That's the whole idea, have an armed militia instead of military or a police force
I am an American "person of color" who owns firearms (at home; I live in the Netherlands currently).
Here's the exact verbiage of the 2nd Amendment:
Interpret that as thou wilt; we've been arguing about it since about 1791.
For what it's worth, I'd amend the amendment to include this snippet from Marx, just to confuse us all even more:
Nope. That’s not what it meant and that’s not what the courts have determined that it meant.
What’s more, my state constitution explicitly grants gun ownership for self defense while simultaneously and explicitly banning membership in any private militia.
So no militia for me. Nice try though.
Yes, that's correct. A standing army in peacetime was not only something that the founders feared, they explicitly put a two year cap on the appropriations needed to fund it. Obviously that's been ignored since before the ink dried.
I'm not sure I understand what that means, my English isn't perfect. Does it mean that 2 years after the creation of an army, it has to be resolved?
My apologies! The other reply gave the correct answer, but for more detail: "appropriations" is basically just the government word for "budget." For most appropriations, the Congress can theoretically decide on the budget for many years into the future, but for the military they are supposed to only authorize two years at a time. The bottom line is, during peacetime, the US isn't supposed to have a standing professional military.
The government also ignores the part in the Second Amendment about how the right to own guns requires gun ownership to be well-regulated and tied to participation in a militia (which is an army made up of people who are trained, armed, and ready to fight in defense of the country, but do a different job when there's not an active conflict). That's supposed to be our national defense strategy, not having the largest and most well-funded standing peacetime military the world has ever known.
Now, I don't know how realistic that model is for the modern state of war. It's tough to have a militia air force, for instance. But if we had followed the law even just a little bit more, I think the world would be better off.
(Edit: I just noticed that you used the word "militia" in your original question. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound patronizing. Just trying to define potentially unfamiliar terms.)
That is why America has never had any peace time longer than two years, I suppose.. 🤔
Actually, technically speaking, the US hasn't been in a formal war since World War II ended in 1947. Yes, there have been military actions more or less continuously since then, but no declared wars. Which is a stupid distinction to make, but it is a distinction.
Anyway, in case I wasn't clear: it's not the declared war that matters, but the two years. There aren't supposed to be any army appropriations that last longer than two years (with the expectation that no war would last that long anyway, and if it did that congress would be motivated to continue funding it). The idea is that a standing army should be impossible in peacetime. A navy is fine--Article 1, Section 8, Clause 13 allows for a standing navy--but clause 12 prohibits appropriations lasting longer than two years, and clauses 15 & 16 give them the militias of the states as the bulwark against "insurrections" and "invasions." (Unfortunately, it does also give Congress the right to use the militia in the pursuit of "execut[ing] the laws of the union," which is terrifying in a lot of ways.)
And actually, I was glib about "since before the ink was dry," but actually we fought every war of the 19th Century with mostly volunteers. A small army (only about 800 soldiers, at the start) was kept to guard frontier forts and national harbor batteries; in time of war, the militias were called up and formed the army (though the word "militia" fell out of use in favor of "National Guard" after the Civil War). Even after World War I, when the draft had ballooned the Army's size from 140,000 to almost 2.5 million, the drawdown began shortly after the war ended, and it was back down to near its prewar numbers by 1920. Around that time, our army was 190,000 strong, making it one of the smaller armies in the world; some estimates put it around 19th in size. When Hitler invaded Poland, the US Army was smaller than Portugal's.
But World War II was the turning point. The US Army grew to over eight million soldiers between 1939 and 1945, and though they were demobilized dramatically quickly (some historians say too quickly), the size of the Army hasn't dropped much below a half-million since. And that size standing military is tough to justify with just guarding harbor batteries; there aren't any more frontier forts, so if you maintain appropriations for more than 500,000 active duty soldiers every two years for almost a century, I think the founders would have some issues with that.
It means it's only funded for two years, but Congress can keep reauthorizing it when it comes up.
and they always instantly do
I mean at this point it would be pretty amazing move to stop funding it just like that. Since it has been an institution taken for granted for so long it would throw things into chaos
The second amendment was written because Patrick Henry was scared of slave rebellions. He was trying to drrail the ratification of the constitution. The argument was that if the federal army was away then nobody would be around to save the slave owners from their deserved fate. Thus Madison creates the second amendment to ensure states have the right to have local militias. The whole idea is for state militias to be in addition to the federal army.
I think it was more that if both the populace and the military have muskets it’d be hard to oppress the populace through force. Doesn’t really hold up though when the populace has small arms and the military can press a button and delete your city block.
That strategy played out so well in the middle east /s
There’s a pretty big difference between taking up arms to defend against an invading nation and taking up arms against your own country doing incrementalism. Before you could start doing any kind of meaningful organizing the fbi would be at your door
Yeah, guns don't do a thing while you're waiting for the front line of fascism to roll over you and your country.
They are convenient once you're well and truly in enemy territory, though.
The cannibal is still hungry, and now the circumstances push him more than ever to eat himself limb by limb.