"Militia", what that meant then.

[Drich]

People spend too much time worrying about what limited men "meant" centuries ago.  A fuller discussion of "what they meant", historically, can't omit the policy of the crown to confiscate gunpowder (in order to choke potentially rebellious colonists off from the supplies required to effectively resist control).  This caused conflict in Concord and Lexington and broadened the scope of the nascent rebellion to include the first armed revolt against the crown in the south.

This is the context in which our current preoccupation with firearms as a means to oppose a tyrannical government was initially formed.  There are a whole host of other reasons that the people who wrote our constitution felated the militia, but none of them will amount to any prescient and level headed thinking on the part of the founding fathers with regards to our predicament today...what with the militia being defunct and all. 

I also suspect that some of the language of the constitution was self serving in that..a group of rebels who used (among other things) the confiscation of gunpowder to incite treason would be unlikely to leave the same door open for the next guys once they'd established control.  Perhaps we should notice that, in arguing for their independence, they made constant reference of the right of armed rebellion. This right is conspicuously absent from our constitution.  It's as if such a compelling right somehow vanished the moment they assumed power.  I don't think that the people who wrote the constitution were interested in some Random Joseph having a gun, unless he was shooting at the british, and once the utilily of the armed rabble was expended..they were chiefly concerned with the same sorts of disarmament and control policies to which they had so recently objected to the point of insurrection.

Long story short.  What any given thing "meant" then will not be uniformly applicable today, nor is there any compulsion that we figure out "what they meant".  What do we mean, what do we want, what can we do, today...better positioned to comment upon these things than the specters of people categorically unreliable in comment or ideology.  The "what they meant" angle is a trap, meant to keep people bickering as a means to stall any current legislation.

Once some of us began to perceive the government devolving into tyranny, those of us interested in opposing that government would need a way to determine if the degree of consensus was sufficient to act.  It is hard to imagine what form such an attempt to determine consensus would take short of holding an election.  Otherwise, those with a short trigger might find themselves dealt with in the same manner as happened in Waco, with the approval of many of the potential militia members who might otherwise have supported insurrection had they been consulted.  So as a practical matter, it is hard to imagine a better way to determine when a consensus had been reached apart from the elections we already hold.

This scene in Mel Gibson's The Patriot is unimaginable nowadays, given the vastly larger number of people and the ease communication and transportation now.

At the beginning of Trumps term there was a rumor that clinton was preparing herself to take the office if trump/pence were found guilty of conclusion with the Russians. I think that would be a very fast catylist to recall a militia. I know if trump himself called for armed militia many would be in DC with in a day or two.