Today, I’m going to tread ground upon which many fear to tread by discussing the first two phrases of the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution states thus: "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."

Seems to me that we have either ignored or simply missed a very vital component of liberty in our discussions and writings about secession...or about the Second Amendment. That very vital component is the existence and use of force.

No reasonable proponent of state sovereignty wants to propose secession and state nationhood through armed overthrow and insurrection. All of the thought leaders of secession that I have read concentrate on the orderly and lawful methods of secession, and eschew any ideas of military resistance. That’s fine.

But James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson had a different perspective.

The Framers knew that when tyranny advanced against any state, the state’s last option to resist that tyranny was to take up arms and fight. They had just proven its effectiveness by seceding from Great Britain through the use of state militias.

Most of the words I’ve ever seen written about the Second Amendment had to do with the last phrase of the Amendment. Even when I wrote about this subject HERE, my emphasis was about firearms.

My only paragraph about the militia said this:......