[nostrademons]

It's interesting that militia are looked at with a lot more suspicion than individual gun ownership. Buy a gun as a mentally-healthy individual with no prior criminal record, and nobody bats an eye. Get together with a few hundred of your gun-toting buddies to train together, and the FBI is probably going to come knocking, unless you're a private security contractor with an obvious profit motive.

Possibly says a lot about what the government does or does not consider a threat.

[solidsnack9000]

Probably better to think in terms of a "military philosophy society" or something like that -- the idea isn't to build a logistics chain for conducting combat operations (that is what a militia has to do) but rather provide a pro-social context for people to learn skills and safety and military history. In the event of a conflict, the members of such an organisation would join the military, not deploy as a separate group with their own colours or what have you (which is what a militia would do).