The Second Amendment Really Was Meant to Protect the Militia

The Mises Institute recently published an article entitled, “ Why We Can’t Ignore the ‘Militia’ Clause of the Second Amendment ,” and it’s really worth a good look. It delves into an often-overlooked facet of the USA’s foundations, namely the preference of local militias to be deployed as needed, rather than having a permanent army — and why this helped form the language of our Second Amendment. The mission statement of Mises includes the promotion of honest history… and this is exactly that. It takes a good look at our founders’ general distrust of standing armies and explores the reasons for including the militia phrase. While many defenders of private gun ownership recognize that the Second Amendment was written to provide some sort of counterbalance against the coercive power of the state, this argument is often left far too vague to reflect an accurate view of this historical context surrounding the Amendment. After all, it is frequently pointed out that private ownership of shotguns and semi-automatic rifles could offer only very limited resistance to the extremely well-equipped and well-armed United States military. It is often, therefore, just assumed that the writers of the Second Amendment were naïve and incapable of seeing the vast asymmetries that would develop between military weaponry and the sort of weaponry the average person was likely to use. Was the plan really to just have unorganized amateurs grab their rifles and repel the invasion of a well-trained military force? The answer is no, and we […]

Click here to view original web page at The Second Amendment Really Was Meant to Protect the Militia