Sounds nice doesn't it. Too bad the very notion is idiotic. (You really need to understand the Swiss thing by the way. You clearly do not.)
Far from ''idiotic'' my friend, as I will attempt to show somewhat to anyone non male fide. And as I do know some persons from Switzerland who know of these matters, I can say at least that I can speak to the matter with intelligibility, if not absolute authority.
I will not descend into an argument that imagines a city militia. We already have that. It is called the police.
They're not a city militia, everyone knows that, most of all the police.
We also have a state Armed force. It is called the National Guard.
Too Federalized in recent years, that needs to be changed.
It is going to be really fun when the city of Tucson tries to figure out how to pay for a tank and a few fighter jets.
You assume that they would need them.
We have seen, throughout the world, what has happened when armed civilians have challenged a modern Army like ours.
Yes, the total inability to defeat a single insurgency in it's modern history speaks volumes about the modern US Military. And in this hypothetical case, many of the Soldiers would be sympathetic to an American popular revolt. See? I'm not talking about the feckless and stupid Libertarians....
The are mowed down like a wheat field. And that is with reasonable people who care about civilian casualties in charge. Remove that distinction and they would stand no chance if they wanted to see their children alive in the morning.
Again, see above. Any Tyrant would have to have their ''American'' military composed mainly of people who don't really consider themselves Americans, and I have doubts about the military effectiveness of such peoples, historically speaking.
Back when wars were fought in a five mile per hour world, in a wilderness of open country with single shot weapons the notion of the local minuteman as a stopping force had validity. Today not.
The ''validity'' rests on the right of a free people to resist unlawful tyranny, not on the technics which can be overcome.
Let me violate Godwin's law and make this point. An armed populace would not have prevented Hitler's rise to power. He was wildly popular with the people. These potential militiamen you rely on flocked to his banner. There was little or no armed resistance in Nazi Germany. This is true today in the US. The government has no trouble raising an army. Men flock to the army particularly in time of trouble.
The American military has a severe problem doing all it tries to do all over the world, which is precisely why they went all volunteer though. A revolt would have no problems raising an army of men, conversely.
Libertards imagine some time when 'liberals' or 'communists' would rise to subjugate the people. What they never imagine is that in their very neighborhood there are a great many people who would rise to oppose them. Look at our overheated political divide today. Imagine a war in which the forces of the right opposed the forces of the 'leftish'. (We really have no appreciable left.) Democrats outnumber republicans. Democrats hold the property that produces most of the guns and other weapons. Think about it. Look at our own civil war. The South never had a chance. The north controlled the means to produce arms and ammunition.
The South made strategic mistakes which doomed the outcome of the initial conflict for them.
The right-wing and libertarian pipe dream about sitting around the campfire in some woods somewhere and plotting to confront the despot's advancing army with their store-bought assault weapons is just that. An unrealistic pipe dream. Their technologically advanced and well trained opponents would swat them like flies. There is nowhere they could hide. And the only place they could reasonably expect to stymie a modern army is in the cities. Care to guess how libertarians are represented in cities?
Again, I'm talking about a popular/popularist revolt, not a ''libertarian pipe dream''
Time to grow up gun owners. You are never going to grab your glock and stare down a tank. Nor is your town going to have one of its own. Welcome to the real world.
Your best hope is to dismantle the kleptocracy that is running Washington now and get your power back by the vote. That is, at least for the time, within the realm of possibility.[/quote]