If may member of the Virginia executive branch is fearful of its well being there is an easy solution.  They can quit.  The quiting office is open 24/7.  Because they fear bad condut by bad people is not a cause for the fear mongers that work in Virginia executive branch to use their bully pulpits to strip the rights we have had since 1245 A.D. to maintain arms for the purpose of maintaining a citizen solider. Those individals in govt. deny

America's colonial citizen-soldier citizens soldier had their counterparts throughout history, as in ancient and medieval times when the peasants were conscripted to fight as foot soldiers. After the wars were over the peasants, too, returned to their fields. Tradesmen, farmers, men in all walks and vocations of life, had one thing in common: they stood as brothers in arms against the enemy as part of the citizen-soldiery.

The citizen-soldier stands in marked contrast to the professional soldier whose vocation is war. The citizen-soldier does not enter war for pay or booty. He goes to war only reluctantly, spurred on by notions of patriotism, nationalism and duty. He deplores war. He fights only as a last recourse when his nation is threatened and not in imperialistic adventures. There is no human institution any where more fundamental than the militia. As we shall show in this and the ensuing four volumes, excepting only religious dissenters, the true, traditional citizens owned firearms, less as a privilege than as a matter of duty. They came to equate firearms ownership with freedom. A free man is armed; a slave is dispossessed of his arms. No man can trust a government that seeks to disarm him. Those who claim the right to bear arms over and against tyrannical government stand arm in arm with his ancestors who refused to give up their arms at Lexington, Concord, and on a thousand other locations.

A recent article concluded that the Second Amendment to the Constitution was adopted "as a declaration that the Federal Government can never fully nationalize all the military forces of this nation" because the masses of men with their own guns constitute "an essentially civilian-manned and oriented set of military forces" who can "inveigh against federal professionalization of the state militia."1 The Preamble to the Declaration of Independence listed as two grievances against King George III that "[h]e has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures [and]. . . [h]e has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the Civil power."2

Reverend Samuel McClintock (1732-1804) was commissioned to deliver a sermon on 3 June 1784, the occasion being the adoption of the newly adopted New Hampshire state constitution. He had served as a militia chaplain in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, and was thus well acquainted with the concept, organization and purpose of a militia system. His comments on that portion of the new basic document of the New Hampshire state government read like a passionate and patriotic definition of militia. "An army of freemen, voluntarily assembling at the alarm of danger -- men who had been nurtured in the bosom of liberty, and unused to slavish restraints . . . willing to submit to the severity of military government, for the safety of their country, and patiently endure hardships that would have overcome the fortitude of veterans, following their illustrious leader in the depths of winter, through the cold and snow, in nakedness and perils, when every step they took was marked with the blood that issued from their swollen feet, and when they could not be animated to such patience and perseverance by any mercenary motives . . . ."3

A recent author4 distinguished among army, trained bands and the various types of militia. An army is any armed land force that is organized and controlled by a clear chain of command. A militia which derived from the Latin miles and the old English and French milice indicated "the obligation of every able bodied Englishman to defend his country." It implies the obligation that all citizens and perhaps resident aliens have to serve in the armed forces of their nation. In the American colonies the transition was made from English common law to the law of the colonies. The federal Constitution made certain that any national obligation did not preclude service to the state which was primary and original. Initially the enrolled militia (or organized militia) included those select or specially trained militia enlisted by the colonies or states. Early select and enrolled militia were occasionally called Trained Bands. The minutemen of New England were select or enrolled militia.