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A Lecture on State Militias and the Second Amendment

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Mises.org

March 23, 2024

The is the second of two lectures I recently gave for the Free Enterprise Society at Oklahoma State University. In this talk, I examine origins of the Second Amendment in the English Civil Wars and how English opponents of absolutism preferred local militias to a national standing army. I look at how the Second Amendment was supposed to serve a similar purpose and ensure that each state possessed enough independent military power to counterbalance federal military power. Unfortunately, the independent state and local militias in America were eventually replaced by the “National Guard” which is essentially now a reserve force for the federal government’s enormous standing army.

The full video is approximately an hour long:

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Ryan W. McMaken is the editor of Mises Daily and The Austrian. Send him mail.

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