The Progressive Pulse: “The Duke Center for Firearms Law held an online roundtable discussion Tuesday exploring the issue in the wake of the 2020 election, the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and a rising tide of militant extremists that call themselves militias.
The forum, moderated by lecturing fellow Jacob Charles of the Duke University Law School, featured law professors Mary McCord of Georgetown University Law Center; Alan Chen of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law; and Timothy Zick of the William and Mary Law School.
The danger in a misunderstanding of established law with regard to guns was made startlingly clear last month, McCord said, when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, killing a police officer and leading to scores of injuries. Despite Washington, D.C. not being an “open carry” state, photos and video footage make it clear that many of insurrectionists were armed with guns.
Such images have unfortunately become almost commonplace at political protests and ideological clashes all over the country — including in North Carolina, where armed neo-Confederates have in the last few years repeatedly clashed with those protesting Confederate monuments.
Even when blatantly flouting local and state gun laws, McCord said, many people will point to the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as granting them blanket protection to carry their guns. This is particularly true of people who are part of paramilitary groups that purport to be “militias,” McCord said.
But the constitution does not give private individuals free license to “organize themselves as militia units and call themselves forth, under their own command and control to engage in militia activity,” McCord said. The phrase “well regulated” militia in the Second Amendment has a historical context, McCord said. Even before the founding of the country, it was understood to mean regulated by the state. The founders had an antipathy toward the idea of a standing army and turned to individual militias. But those militias were then trained, funded and directed by the government. The authority to call forth militias lays with the Congress and with governors with regard to National Guard units and state militias.”