All 50 states, in some way or another, ban private armies, militias or paramilitary forces within their borders. Washington state’s constitution asserts that any militia must be in “strict subordination to civil power,” meaning the state or the federal government. It also affirms a citizen’s right to bear arms for defense of self or state, but cautions that those rights should not be construed as “authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain or employ an armed body of men.”
In recent years, armed bodies of men have become a regular spectacle at protest sites across the country. Men with semi-automatic weapons draped over their shoulders and pistols packed on
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