YOUR STATE DEFENSE FORCE

Right now, 20 states have active defense forces. Their organizations and responsibilities vary, but, generally, they serve as technical and operational support for the state national guard. They provide response to public emergencies such as weather or man-made disasters.  They cannot be federalized; and they do not [usually] carry weapons. -- [edited 15 March 2017]

Green states have their own units
(March 2017: Oregon, Arizona, Louisiana, Alabama, 
Connecticut are all inactive.  Massachusetts is a
ceremonial honor guard only.)
From oko.ohmr.ohio.gov

 While prior military service is common in the ranks, it is not a requirement for enlistment.  Ohio is exceptional in conducting annual physical fitness tests, including  push ups, sit ups, a one mile run, and measurement of waist-to-hips ratio, for active deployment.  Here in Texas, you can join at 65 and serve until you are 70; and you can be extended by special orders.

Maryland recently created a cyber defense unit.  In addition to a medical regiment, Maryland volunteers can work in engineering, finance, information technology and communications, legal, religious, and logistics and supplies.  Some Maryland Defense Force civil affairs cadres work as interpreters. 

 “The Ohio Military Reserve is a component of the Ohio Adjutant General's Department and serves under the governor as commander in chief. Its primary mission is to provide a fully-manned and mission-ready civil support and sustainment brigade to support the state's Emergency Support Function 6 (mass care) and Emergency Support Function 7 (logistics and resource support) during natural or man-made disasters or other threats to homeland security. In order to accomplish this mission, OHMR units are trained in medical support, volunteer reception and management, shelter management and logistics support in addition to basic soldier skills. Our core competencies are training to National Incident Management System (NIMS), Military Emergency Management Specialist (MEMS), and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) standards.” -- http://ohmr.ohio.gov

Several states, such as Ohio and Maryland, point to old traditions of citizen militias.  Ohio became a state in 1803.  The Maryland Defense Force claims roots in the 17^th century.  (Their website does not mention the war with Pennsylvania.)  However, the modern state defense forces are identified with the Militia Act of 1903 (Militia Efficiency Act or Dick Act), which reorganized the state national guards and defined more closely when they could be federalized. 

U.S. Code Title 32 Chapter 1 Section 109 (1916) empowered the states to create their own guard units commanded by the state governor. The Federal government activated the Maryland National Guard to the Mexican border in 1916, along with the national guards of Massachusetts, New York, Iowa, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.  World War I brought federal mobilization of all the national guards, creating the need for the home units. (Wikipedia “State Defense Force” here.  Also US Code archived at Cornell Law School and with attributing footnotes at Versus Law.)

“The Dick Act prohibited states from retaining their own militia systems. Ohio was one of the states that chose not to follow the federal mandate and [chose to] maintain such a force. A principal reason for the continuation of the Ohio Militia was the desire to protect Lake Erie. There was no Naval National Guard.” http://oko.ohmr.ohio.gov/join/info_about.php

As in many other states, here in Texas, our state guard  is under the adjutant general’s office, along with the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard.  The Texas State Guard Air Component is primarily a weather service, and also trains for a wide range of other duties. Unlike the other branches - Maritime Regiment, Army Component, and Medical Rangers – the Air Component [often] drills with their active guard counterparts.  

The Texas Maritime Regiment operates dive teams and boat operations for search and rescue and other tasks.  They serve along the salt water coast (367 miles) and the river waterways (4400 miles of major bodies and perhaps that many more lesser rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, and bayous).

“The Maritime Regiment specifically embraces the unique structure and traditions of America’s Naval and Marine forces in preparing troops to carry out  duties related to Texas’ land, marine, littoral and riverine environments. In the interest of creating the most effective response team, TMAR has forged working relationships with various groups such as the U.S. Coast Guard, Texas Parks and Wildlife, Texas Forest Service, and the Lower Colorado River Authority.  The Regiment‘s members are true volunteers who willingly accept military discipline, orders and training to answer the call to meet urgent human needs in times of peril or crisis.”

Generally, across the states, you are a volunteer and cannot be required to deploy. Most states ask for a commitment of a weekend a month. Here in Texas, the promise is at least three years of 200 hours per year. Some drills are only one day. If you are prior military (about half of those enlisted or commissioned), you usually bring your last grade with you. Civilians usually have supervisory experience and often a college education.  Grades ("ranks" private through general), are assigned at first on that basis. 

The TSG operates evacuation and sheltering centers
in times of natural and man-made disasters. 
Among the missions of the Texas State Guard are:
Mass care/Functional needs care 
Emergency communications 
Special needs evacuation tracking 
Wide area damage assessment
FACT SHEET here

As a volunteer, you are not paid to drill and train. You supply your own standardized and specified uniforms and equipment. Here in Texas, when deployed for an emergency, all personnel receive $121 per day, sometimes with a food allowance of $35 per day, regardless of component, grade, or rank.

[Subsequent to the July 16, 2015, terrorist attacks in Chattanooga that targeted soft military sites - a recruiter and a supply depot - the Adjutant General of Texas was not alone in applying state law and allowing concealed carrying of firearms for those who are so licensed.  You cannot display any weapon you were not issued, but you can have a concealed firearm subject to a permit. Here in Texas, only a magistrate or a peace officer (defined in the state constitution) can ask if you are armed and ask to see your permit.]

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Volunteering in an Emergency: What to Expect
Drones are Everywhere

Modes of Survival

Liberty's Kids

Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part 2.

“Handguns are instruments for killing people - they are not carried for hunting animals - and you have no right to kill people.” Ayn Rand at Ford Hall Forum, October 21, 1973.

It is not so much that legislation solves problems, but rather that the formal expression of social norms elevates them above being mere folkways. Homicide was not against the law in archaic Athens until the reforms of Drakon (c. 650 BCE). Even today, blood feud is the time-honored method of rebalancing injustice; and it continues in traditional societies. (See Vengeance is Mine: Justice Albanian Style by Fatos Tarifa; Chapel Hill: Globic Press, 2008.) In “Politics as a Profession” (1918) Max Weber enunciated the principle we accept today that the state has a monopoly on physical force.  That monopoly includes the right to assign proxy to others.  Thus, even in a state that forbids capital punishment, the police on the street can take a life. We give to the patrol officer the power of prosecutor, jury, judge, and executioner. I question that.

The Baker Batshield has your back

            Faced with the unequivocal weaponry of the state, criminals also arm themselves. For 150 years, the London Metropolitan Police were unarmed, as were the criminals. The conflict with the IRA and the rise of foreign gangs unsocialized to British folkways changed that. Now, when they knock to enter before bashing down the door, the bobbies announce themselves “Armed police!”  That only begs the question.  It is also true that those who would commit violence need no special excuse. Murder will not go away if the police are disarmed.

Moreover, the unarmed police will face armed perpetrators. As violence only begets violence, better solutions must be found to minimizing, ameliorating, and negating armed conflict.

            We organize our police as military.  Far deeper and far beyond the uniforms – though there is that – is the institutional structure, which reinforces the perception among the police themselves that they are an occupying army. 

A deployable net

            Waiting for a former instructor at my community college alma mater, I sat in on a class in “Police and the Community.” It was being taught by a police sergeant.  She said that there are good people and perpetrators; and the job of the police is to protect the community from the bad guys. . It was not my class, so I did not point out that the so-called perpetrators are in and of the community. As Newt Gingrich once reminded a Republican dinner, most Americans see the posted speed limit as a benchmark of opportunity. In that context, we segregate people in special clothing to commit acts, which if carried out by others, would be crimes. So, when a police officer accidentally kills the wrong fleeing felon, there is no restoration. The officer does not apologize; and the state which empowered the homicide admits no harm and pays no compensation.

A deployable net

           
The denial of responsibility is the first of five “Techniques of Neutralization” by which criminals excuse and justify their acts. (See “Techniques of Neutralization: a theory of delinquency,” Sykes, Gresham M. and David Matza, American Sociological Review, 22, 664-673.) These statements also apply to the state, and therefore to the police. (And, they also were heard from the civil rights movement and the anti-war protesters of the 50s and 60s, just as they come from the Occupiers today, all of whom engage in civil disobedience.)

1. Denial of responsibility (The state responds to crime caused by perpetrators. You brought this on yourself.)
2. Denial of injury (You deserve the consequences. Prison will be good for you.)
3. Denial of the victim (Perps are not good people. If he was not guilty, he would not have fled.)
4. Condemnation of the condemners (Do-gooders are soft on crime. Courts are too lenient.)
5. Appeal to higher loyalties (Thin blue line and new centurions. In God we trust. E pluribus unum.)

Ayn Rand famously said that no political change can come without a shift in the dominant philosophical foundations of our culture and society. Gun control laws can be no more effect than drug control laws, and for the same reasons. The deeper needs for guns and drugs are found within individuals with unworkable, irrational personal philosophies – and often a complete lack of any formally defined credo.

            It is not necessary that everyone change. The golden age of Greece, the Islamic Golden Age, the European Renaissance, the Three Kingdoms and later the Southern Sung of China, in each case, most people changed nothing of themselves, though they accepted the new social contexts around them.

           In our time, perhaps the greatest potential for a better future comes not from any single philosophy, but from the plethora of them. Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies was a plea for tolerance based on the admission of ignorance. No one has a monopoly on truth. Ironically, the large number of competing owners of absolute truth has created for us a complex matrix of beliefs, assertions, claims, philosophies, and religions. As long as none can dominate, all can flourish.

Bulletproof fashions from Miguel Caballero

Survival of the Fitted

The rise of bulletproof couture.

by David Owen The New Yorker, September 26, 2011

Fashionable bullet-proof wear finds growth abroad

by Jim Wyss The Miami Herald

Q: What is your opinion of gun control laws?

A: I do not know enough about it to have an opinion, except to say that it is not of primary importance. Forbidding guns or registering them is not going to stop criminals from having them; nor is it a great threat to the private, non-criminal citizen if he has to register the fact that he has a gun. It is not an important issue, unless you're ready to begin a private uprising right now, which isn't very practical. [Ford Hall Forum, 1971]

Q: What's your attitude toward gun control?
A: It is a complex, technical issue in the philosophy of law. Handguns are instruments for killing people -- they are not carried for hunting animals -- and you have no right to kill people. You do have the right to self-defense, however. I don't know how the issue is going to be resolved to protect you without giving you the privilege to kill people at whim. [Ford Hall Forum, 1973]

From Ayn Rand Answers: the Best of Her Q&A, edited by Robert Mayhew © 2005 by The Estate of Ayn Rand.

“FBI agents alerted police about their interest in late October, shortly after the Travis County medical examiner's office released a report saying that 20-year-old Byron Carter Jr. had been shot four times, including once in the head.

            A teenager who drove a car toward two police officers on East Eighth Street.in late May, leading to the fatal shooting of his passenger by one of the officers, will not face criminal charges, the Travis County District Attorney's office said Thursday.  A grand jury completed its review of the incident and declined to indict the teen, officials said. The teen was not named in court documents because he is a juvenile. Police have said he is 16 years old.”

Holding back tears, San Angelo police Sgt. Matt Baldwin recounted stories about the kind of police officer his friend Jaime Padron was. 

The time Padron ran into a burning house with his partner to save two children trapped inside. The time Padron entered a business when a gunman was inside. The time he and Padron were outnumbered in a fight with several suspects, but persevered and made the arrest. 

"That was Jaime the cop," Baldwin said Friday at Padron's funeral Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church — a service bursting at the seams with Padron's fellow officers from Austin and San Angelo and with family, friends and well-wishers. "He loved being a cop. He was good at it." ... much has been written and said about "Jaime the cop" in the week since he was fatally shot at a North Austin Wal-Mart ... Padron was shot after confronting a shoplifting suspect about 2:30 a.m. April 6. The suspect in the shooting, Brandon Montgomery Daniel, remains jailed on a charge of capital murder.”
ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part 1.
Redshirts
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Private Security in the 21st Century
Physical Security for Data Centers (Slideshare View and Download)