Comments on Surviving Phalaris: Summary And Concluding Arguments for "Rights Abdic...

2010-04-13T10:33:59.599-06:00
Alan Avans posted an interesting link that touches on some points we have discussed in this argument.

The article is about the Tea Party Movement in Oklahoma whose idea it is to start up an old-fashioned citizen militia.

Some excerpts that I find interesting are these:

State Sen. Randy Brogdon, R-Owasso, a Republican candidate for governor who has appealed for tea party support, said supporters of a state militia have talked to him, and that he believes the citizen unit would be authorized under the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

The founding fathers "were not referring to a turkey shoot or a quail hunt. They really weren't even talking about us having the ability to protect ourselves against each other," Brogdon said. "The Second Amendment deals directly with the right of an individual to keep and bear arms to protect themselves from an overreaching federal government."

...

State militias clearly are constitutionally authorized, but have not been used in recent times, said Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and an expert on the Second Amendment. "Whether someone should get a militia to go toe-to-toe with the federal government ... now, that strikes me as kind of silly," he said.

It is also interesting to read some of the reactions to this idea in the reader comments.