A Lecture on State Militias and the Second Amendment

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 indep...