Lehr und Wehr Verein ("Educational and Defense Society") was a socialist military organization founded in 1875, in Chicago, Illinois. The group had been formed to counter the armed private armies of companies in Chicago.
-The Internet

Never heard of them before. As a response to worker self-organization the state made it so that all militias had to register with the state and wouldn’t you know the state made it illegal for revolutionary worker militias to exist above the board. In response, Lehr und Wehr Verein made a 2A legal appeal.

In a strange twist we now see 2A absolutists carving space for themselves but in doing so also space for armed radicals, socialists, anarchists, communists, and leftists broadly to re-emerge.

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Robert Koehler, 'The socialist' (1885)

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