Look to Switzerland

Since January, I’ve followed the exchange here about the meaning of the Second Amendment. I’m encouraged that what began as a debate on the (individual) right to own guns for defensive purposes has become a discussion about the nature, purpose and value of the (collective) militia. This is indeed a vital and long-overdue conversation.

Eric Walker (Letters, June 6) is correct: Our founders harbored “an abiding distrust of a standing army” as a tool of tyrants, and thus preferred a citizen militia to a professional soldiery. But his claim that their “position (was) very difficult to justify even then, and utterly impossible today” seems to assume that the founders had a global imperium, rather than an armed but humble America, as their goal.

A militia-based national defense is quite feasible. Switzerland is small and prosperous, but humble (i.e., neutral) and well-defended by an armed citizenry augmented by a small corps of military professionals. U.S. generals Lewis Walt and George Patton favorably examined Switzerland’s militia-based defense in “The Swiss Report” (1983).

America could likewise defend herself with an armed citizenry, but only if we renounce our penchant for policing and democratizing the world under the guise of “national defense.”

Frank Golubski

Spokane Valley