I don;t know who changed all this language about militia buit it is not historically correct.

In the meantime I haven’t answered some questions and I haven’t written about iother things.

The National Guard Association of the United States was founded in 1878 as a congressional lobbying organization for National Guard issues….

Major General Charles Dick was president of the National Guard Association of the United States from 1902 to 1909.

So maybe it was the National Guard Association and not the National Rifle Association that twisted the law??

http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=D000302

Dick was sort of like second to Mark Hanna, and replaced him in the Senate. He was not able to get re-elected in 1910. According to the New York Times, he tried to get back into the Senate as late as 1926 (not just 1922)

According to this, under the old militia act of 1792, the President could issue a call for troops, with the War Department setting a quota for each state and the Governor would ask for volunteers. Many refused, and others failed the physical examination the army gave, and civilians were directly recruited by the state to go into the army, and they wound up with a cadre of Guard officers and noncommissioned officers and large numbers of enlisted men with no prior military training.

Now there was this Congressman Charles Dick, chairman of the House Militia Affairs Committee and a long-time Ohio National Guard officer. (He’d also served in Cuba in the Spanish American War. You notice here Ohio is one of the states where the name had been changed)

Since 1882, it says, “some National Guardsmen” had been lobbying for Congress to repeal the Militia Act of 1792, officially designate the Guard as the Army’s reserve force, and greatly increase the federal government’s support of state units with funds, equipment, and supplies.

Equipment and supplies = guns and other things sold by private businesses.

“When Root created a board of officers to study how to reform the Army, he included on it a Guard officer, and the board allowed prominent Guard officers to contribute to its deliberations on militia matters.”

So far the NRA is not mentioned, but lobbying has been, and I can see where the NRA can show up.

The act gave the president the authority to call up what was now called the National Guard for nine months. If states didn’t prepare the Guard properly, they’d lose their federal support. Any person who refused a call up would face court martial. In 1908 the nine month limit was eliminated. The appropriation was increased and the War Department established the Division of Militia Affairs. They were still using the word militia, you see..

This was still not a ready reserve and there was too much infantry. Training now took more time, but some of it was boring, and/or unpaid and people quit and they stopped trying to do real training, had inadequate armories, and the Regular army didn’t do all the inspection, and it didn’t believe in this.

“Based on the Regulars’ evaluation of the Guard’s shortcomings and a 1912 ruling by the Judge Advocate General that Congress was in error when it approved the use of the Guard outside the United States, the General Staff concluded that the Guard as an institution was now unsuitable for modern war and could never be an effective reserve force for the Army.

The staff’s consequent “Continental Army” plan more than doubled the size of the Regular Army, created a permanent federal volunteer reserve force–the Continental Army–and limited the National Guard in federal service to repelling invasions, suppressing rebellion, and enforcing federal laws.

The plan also called for Congress to repeal the 1908 provision giving the Guard preference over any wartime federal volunteer force.

While Guardsmen lobbied vigorously against the plan, it was defeated in Congress early in 1916 for other reasons: doubts that the Continental Army could recruit sufficient men; concern that it would be too expensive; dislike of ceding more power to the federal government; and fear that the plan was a militaristic threat to American democracy.

In 1916 Congress passed the National Defense Act. All members now were dual enlistees into the militia and the army reserve. The War Department got more control, and the Regulars got their own reserve. Once called up, they were reorganized and after World War I, National Guardsmen were discharged individually and not as units. In 1920 here was an attempt to get rid of the idea of the National Guard as a reserve, but it was defeated. The National Guard lobby was too strong, I guess.

Nothing here though, about the genesis of some ideas, and why name changes happened and who was for it. You can see how spurious history or description was inserted in the Militia act of 1903, with its “Reserve militia” (or unorganized militia) and it’s “Organized Militia” which was everything that used to be called the plain old militia.

“And if it is idiotic, somebody must haave lobbied that into the bill – lobbied for that whole bill. The oinly real candidate in sight is the NRA. The NRA was active at the time, the NRA lies, it;s the National Rifle Association. QED”

Sammy, as a demonstration of your reasoning powers, those comments of yours I’ve quoted above look more like a cry for help. Is your blood all getting above your neckline OK?

Sheesh, Sammy, how is it that you work so hard at being so dense?