The Militia

Officially, a militia is part of the organized armed forces of a country that is called upon only in an emergency. There have been paramilitary groups with revolutionary ideas throughout America's history, but today's militia movement is a new more organized and violent presence (Meyers). Today the militia are unofficial citizens' armies organized by private individuals, usually with antigovernment, far right agendas. They rationalize that the American people need armed force to help defend themselves against an increasingly oppressive government that is becoming part of a global conspiracy called the "New World Order" (Sonder, 2000). These armed groups call themselves militias; to both imply the image of the Minuteman of the Revolution and to try to claim legitimacy by asserting that these paramilitary groups were the "unorganized militia" of federal and state law. The causes for the militia movement are many, but most center around a fear of gun confiscation and the role such confiscation would play in their various one-world conspiracy theories.

The major events, which helped to incite the movement, include the Ruby Ridge and Waco standoffs, the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Manufacture Ban. The first groups began forming at the end of 1993; by mid-1994 (Sonder, 2000) there were a variety of such groups in many states across the country. While the media noted the emergence of this movement, little attention was paid to the phenomenon until late 1994, when civil rights organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League released reports on the militia movement. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center most of these citizens' armies have few members and are not involved in violent activities (Sonder, 2000). They are interested mostly in the purchase and use of firearms, in discussions of patriotism, and in playing weekend war games. However, there are more than a hundred of these groups, which probably have ties to violent right wing and racist organizations.

The militia exploded into prominence, however, in April 1995 when early reports indicated that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombing suspects, had belonged to a Michigan militia, or that militia groups were in some way directly connected to the bombing. As a result, nearly every newspaper and television station began looking at local militia groups. By and large, the intense publicity caused the movement to grow, as many would-be sympathizers heard about the existence of the movement for the first time. Militia growth appears to have been steady throughout 1995 and the first half of 1996 (Sonder, 2000).

The primary illegal activities among militia groups are related to weapons and explosives. Militia groups in Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Washington, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, California, and a number of other states have seen members arrested for possession of illegal weapons and explosives. People in the movement tend to give inflated numbers, in order to make their movement seem larger, and at the same time, because they are so paranoid, will refuse to allow people to actually count their numbers. In addition, groups go in and out of existence all the time, and there are many people who are part of the movement, without being card-carrying members of any one particular group. There are some groups few people know about because they are underground. All these factors together make it impossible to say with any certainty how many militia groups there are. The number of groups is certainly in the hundreds.

The militia movement has many people who could be called law-abiding citizens. However, many members conduct criminal activity (Dees, 1996). The most common is the collection of illegal weapons and explosives. Sometimes these illegal arsenals are stunning in their size. Since militia members tend to believe that they have the right to own whatever sort of weapon they want to, and they need to arm themselves to oppose a current or future tyrannical government, as a result many of them to decide to acquire illegal weapons such as machine guns, fully automatic weapons, silencers, sawed off shotguns, and explosives. Some members go further than collecting weapons and actually plan to use them. In the past few years, different militia groups have plotted to bomb various government buildings,