My recent column reporting on New York Times columnist Joe Nocera’s “The Gun Report,” a daily compilation of gun deaths in the United States, brought the usual avalanche of vitriolic comments, including several that informed me I had my head where the sun doesn’t shine. But one comment sparked my attention. It was from Madisonian Bill Jolin, who actually worked for us as a reporter back in the early 1980s. He left for Oregon, came back to town several years later and last I knew was running a lawn service on the east side of town.

Bill informed me he has his own “solution” to the perennial argument over guns and gun rights.

“I think what we need is the well-regulated militia! The constitution is clear: ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’ ”

So, he implored, let’s get it going.

“Every citizen is conscripted as a duty of citizenship, for a year or so of national service,” he wrote. “All the boys and all the girls; no exceptions! Then everybody gets militia training, including weapons training. Strict education would go a long way to prevent accidents.”

What’s intriguing about Bill’s solution is that it could address so much more than making sure folks get some training on how to safely use and store guns so kids don’t wind up shooting each other.

For instance, Bill wrote, “it gets a single national experience everyone shares, which is lacking now. Where do people of different classes meet anymore? Not in schools, not in offices, nowhere. Class divisions are deepening.”

Under his plan, the conscripts become a national cadet class. They get:

1. Identified — no more hassle about voting rights.

2. Tested for academic levels — everyone who hasn’t graduated gets to finish high school on Uncle Sam. The military and government can recuit from the national cadet class.

3. Tested for physical health and mental health, with appropriate follow-up. Having been soldiers, they get veteran status and a national medical system to care for them.

4. Put to work, at a thousand public service projects, at the beginning of their careers.

In the end, Bill insists, everyone would have a stake in a free society, would have contributed to it, and would help assure that it would always be free.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.  and @DaveZweifel

For your information, this is America, not North Korea, here we’re not supposed to draft people into anything. I know Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, JFK and Nixon drafted people, they were wrong.

The draft is wrong because you can’t fight for freedom while enslaving people. It’s simply illogical, it’s anti-individual, and it results in more soldiers’ deaths, or have we forgotten all the drug use during the Vietnam war?  Drugs and war don’t mix.

Make no mistake, I’m not anti-war, but just like I don’t believe in drafting butchers, shoemakers, doctors, I also believe an all-volunteer military is best. Yes, I know Gunny can make almost anyone into a Marine, but if you were a military recruiter who do you want the most? The long-haired hippie that hates work or the high school quaterback built for combat?

But getting back to the militia, the militia is the individual, I am a militia. If I CHOOSE to join another militia that is my business, not the government’s. Well-regulated means “well-trained,” soldiers back then were known as regulars for a reason.