In 1888, a confrontation in the coal-mining town of Roslyn, in Kittitas County, just east of the Cascade crest, helped shape the Washington state constitution. The incident, a small chapter in a longer narrative of regional tumult, involved union laborers, strikebreakers, hired railroad guards armed with weapons and violent clashes over race.
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 their waists have appeared at far-right freedom rallies in Olympia, anti-racist protests in Portland and, on Jan. 6, at the nation’s Capitol, where a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the halls of Congress. The proliferation of armed demonstrators has alarmed many observers, and now some Washington state legislators are responding. During the current legislative session, they hope to strengthen rules and enforcement around guns, protests and paramilitary groups, which in some cases — when people brandish weapons with an intent to intimidate, for example — appear to be in violation of state law.
When the Washington Territory was on the brink of statehood, serious concerns were raised by events ranging from mob violence to the armed suppression of workers, and about who had the right to carry arms to maintain order. How did the original constitutional prohibition come about?