Tag Archives: Firearms

Kyle Rittenhouse and the militia obligation

Post Syndicated from esr original http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8752

There’s an angle on the case of Kyle Rittenhouse that I haven’t seen even hinted at in the media.

Section 311 of US Code Title 10, entitled, “Militia: composition and classes” reads:

“(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are:

(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and

(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.”

That is, all males of military age who are or intend to become citizens of the United States are under federal statute the “unorganized militia”, and have the duty of the militia to defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic (as both naturalizing citizens and members of the armed forces swear to do).

Kyle Rittenhouse is a 17-year-old male and thus a member of the unorganized militia under black-letter Federal law. When he armed up to defend a friend’s business during a breakdown in civil order, he was acting precisely as all members of the unorganized militia have a legal and Constitutional duty to act in like circumstances.

So let’s not here any more nonsense about a teenager having no business being in that situation. Kyle Rittenhouse recognized one of his core duties as an American citizen and performed it with exceptional skill and courage.

Yeet not, unless ye be yoten upon

Post Syndicated from esr original http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8712

This is an answer I posted to Stack Overflow: Linguistics that was so much fun to write that I feel like sharing it with my blog audience. The question is: What is the past tense of ‘yeet’?

I have a field sighting of the form “yoten” to report.

In January I was involved with the organizing for the big pro-Second-Amendment demonstration in Richmond, VA. One of the central concerns of the organizers, in view of the extreme hostility of the media against firearms rights, was to keep the demonstration strictly nonviolent.

Among the many memes and images posted on social media to express concurrence with this goal was a sort of cartoon of plucky musket-bearing rebels in Revolutionary War costume. The caption read:

“Yeet not unless ye be yoten upon!

You can’t tell gun-culture folks to be passively nonviolent; they’ll just laugh at you. You can preach an ethic of alert nonaggression, and that’s what this memester did. That fits their values, and works.

So we see “yeet” being used for the act of firing a weapon (no surprise; I already knew videogamers used it that way before this). We also have “yoten” as past tense in perfective aspect.

Subsequently someone else else posted a chart of the full conjugation of “yeet”. It did include “yote” as the simple past, and in general was a meticulous and knowing parody of the Germanic strong verb.

Watching culture being invented is a marvellous thing!

I concur with previous answers that the strong-verb system is not as yet entirely nonproductive in English. We should not expect new production of ablaut to obey historical rules for OE verb classes, but rather to template itself on surviving strong verbs.

I offer in this connection the following models: “speak/spoke/spoken”, “freeze/froze/frozen”, and “break/broke/broken”.

I further note that I have previously observed a tendency for such irregular inflections to flourish where humor is intended, and if the message of “Yeet not unless ye be yoten upon!” was serious the form of it was intentionally funny.

In another subculture that I am involved with, the name of a now obsolete minicomputer called a “VAX” was pluralized to “vaxen”, not “vaxes”, allegedly because the machine was as slow as an ox. This joke became productive: today, people in that culture may pluralize “box” (used in the sense of a computer, e.g a Unix box) as “boxen”.

The meme was successful. Enough armed gunfolks showed up to overmatch an infantry division, and the day was entirely peaceful.