US News and World Report ran an article yesterday making the case that these militias are not actually legal, but that broadly summarizes the rationale for allowing them to exist:
Quote:
Yet the groups go largely unchecked because law enforcement often does not enforce anti-militia laws due to a number of overlapping reasons, most based in ignorance or misunderstanding, analysts say. Law enforcement is sometimes simply unaware of state statutes that define and prohibit private militias and paramilitary activity.
That ignorance can be tied, McCord says, to a widely held "mythology" that the Second Amendment protects militia-like activity – an expansive understanding of the amendment's protections that has been promoted by cultural forces like the National Rifle Association, which in recent years has championed "stand your ground" laws in states across the U.S. and characterized guns as a protection against tyranny.
"I think the NRA and other Second Amendment absolutists have been remarkably successful over the last several decades at sort of just convincing people that the Second Amendment protects private militia activity, especially in open carry states," McCord says, referring to statutes that allow residents to openly carry firearms in public and in some cases permit the display of long guns like semi-automatic rifles.
The line between a citizen legally carrying a weapon in public and what constitutes illegal paramilitary action, therefore, often goes unrecognized by law enforcement.
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(i'm not really sure I agree with their conclusion - that these are roundly illegal, that is - but i also don't really care a whole lot about arguing what some two-hundred-year-old document really means anyway so)