Besides, the Supreme Court never was a good tool to determine what the Constitution meant or did not meant, if only because the most devastating arguments were carried out by the citizens in such things as the Civil War, the Trail of Tears, and the Revolutionary War. Concerning the right to fight or die, the Supreme Court would have a non-existent record if not for its patently bad record.

For example, the supreme court never had jurisdiction over individual freedoms, that was the job and rightful jurisdiction of the Bill of Rights. Because such powers were reserved to the People, and not to the states or the federal government, no Supreme Court can ever change the rights of an individual. Therefore the organization of a militia is forever beyond them.

The heirarchy of rights and jurisdiction was argued over and solved. The states did not have the right to violate human rights in the guise of state’s rights (Civil War). And that the federal government de facto and de jure had the responsibility for ensuring and protecting individual rights regardless of location in the US. Assuming in such cases the individual states cannot accomplish said goal (inter-state lines).

Congress and the Supreme Court do not have jurisdiction over a guerrila army.

Amendment IX

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

The federal government itself seeks to gain more power, such as acquiring private property without just compensation. Just, not arbitrary. People back then didn’t even believe a Bill of Rights was needed, because they thought the Constitution had adequate protections all on its own. Maybe they underestimated the mendacity of humanity.

Certain spelled out in the Declaration of Independence were not actually articulated in the Bill or the Constitution, except perhaps indirectly. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It was about individuals, while the Bill of Rights were about things that the state/federal government could not do or could do only in a certain way. It was designed to ensure certain individual protections, but it was written towards the state and federal government.

Amendment I

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.

Sort of like the 10 commandments, these things are things you cannot do. Not will not, cannot. Cannot until the federal and state governments, change the books around a bit that is.

I do not believe everything about what a person can do in the pursuit of happiness, life, and liberty was to be regulated. Therefore the federal government has a duty and the right to protect the common good and welfare, but what does that mean for individuals? Does that mean the gov can protect the individuals from themselves, from the consequences of their own actions? I don’t believe so.

Is a neighborhood watch to the United States Military Code of Justice? Why not?

There are certain organizations that are not there to protect the common good or the US Constitution and its people from all enemies, foreign or domestic. These organizations are there to protect the people, small numbers of individuals, mostly local in geography, period.

The police were always there to protect the common good, the community. It was up to individuals to protect their individual selves and families and neighbors. That has always been the case, considering the lack of secret police powers.

Perhaps I’m wrong in suggesting they’re not the same, but in some aspects they are treated the same, but perhaps I have a valid point…

Banning handguns means that only politicians get protection in DC and you are only allowed to defend yourself against people who wouldn’t be defeated by a handgun. You are no longer allowed to defend yourself against people who may be defeated by handguns because… de jure and de facto you are not longer allowed to. De facto because they confiscate them or use other enforcement branches to extract them from living fingers.

So in any case of a US army vs US citizenry, the organization of the army is setup to follow the orders of their superior officers. Individuals may resist, but they may only be effective through active organization, which presumes that there is someone to organize the effort. I don’t think you should rely on assumptions as flimsy as that to guarantee liberty for countless generations and centuries. So, we turn to others for solutions, since it is unsure whether the military could effective resist totalitarian orders.

The others would be civilians, men and women. Usually untrained folks are fodder to an army, any army. However, these civilians were once in the military, but they got out (remember the Praetorian Guard). They got out with the skills needed to train cadres, which are critically important to any kind of resistance, insurgency, or guerrila force.

The former military people therefore have the skills, although not the heavy weapons, of the standing army, but are NOT under a duty to obey any orders from the federal government.

Therefore the whole point of the 2nd Amendment, to me, is to stockpile heavy weapons so that civilians can easily access them for their defense, against anything really, if only because the federal government in limiting what civilians can protect themselves against, is itself a power that will be corrupted and therefore no guarantee of safety for the civilians’ life or liberty.

When the government says that you can’t use handguns in a certain place, that limits your ability and means to defend against a threat, and therefore in actuality (if not legally) you are limited to defending yourself only against the threats the the government says you can defend against. This isn’t exactly wise to do. The government’s duty to protect against domestic and foreign enemies are rather obviously spelled out, so they can limit your ability to interfere on those fronts. But there are many dangers to the individual, that at the same time are not a danger to national/state security, foreign wise or domestic.

Banning handguns means that only politicians get protection in DCallowed to. De facto because they confiscate them or use other enforcement branches to extract them from living fingers.

They make the decision for you. Nobody seems to accept the government telling them what they can say or cannot say (the US unlike Europe, don’t prosecute hate speech, except for the PC variant), but they gladly accept a far more fundamental curtailment. Because without the 2nd Amendment, the United States of America cannot sustain the First Amendment. In practice that is, since it will still be in the law, it just won’t matter. Fear, as we see with the Islamic jihad cartoons, is not something the First Amendment actively nullifies.

Because the National Guard not only can be sent to Iraq, but has been sent to Iraq, they cannot really be the militia. Because they are not just there to defend the heart home.

The point of a militia, after all, is to supplement the professional and standing army in matters of emergencies, such as invasions. In modern terms, they might be called a potential guerrila army, with decentralized cells for a chain of command.

Decentralizated chains of command, just by definition, cannot be mustered by a central authority. They can work with a central authority, but it really isn’t the same. All the enforcement arms of the state and the federal government are there for a reason. The governor can call upon the National Guard because the NG of each state is that state’s personal army, federalized into the greater United States, and fighting alongside the US standing and professional army forces.

The Founding Fathers were untypically rather broad and idealistic in their framing of rights. Meaning, people have rights and we assume they can’t be taken away. Even with conflicts such as slavery, they took pains to spell things out broadly, which ended up giving future generations a way to reshape and reaffirm new and old laws.

The very definition of making a law is to restrict and control, to infringe, as a criminal’s rights are infringed upon for the common safety of all via due process.

Steve doesn’t really fully agree with Bookworm. It just may look like it. I’ll add something that sheds some light on a possible hidden disagreement.

Women didn’t serve in the army, in the terms of using a weapon to kill. But they had the same duty as the men, which is to protect the children. And many of them knew how to use weapons such as rifles.

There’s room for some uncertainty here. Because when they used the term “People” that obviously included women, but what about militias? When women are protecting their city/town from invaders, by using and wielding a weapon, what do you call them? You have to call them something.

What about women nurses in the armed forces, if they are not soldiers then what are they?

This just seems to me to be a simple question of who is human and can be called a person, deserving of the rights spelled out in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Presumably we include blacks even though they weren’t de facto included back then. So should women be treated as equal human beings, with the same duty, and allowed the right to bear arms like any other milita/federal army?

This gets to the hidden disagreement. If women were considered part of the militia, either de facto or de jure, then how can people say that the militia is like the armed forces? As far as I know, the government couldn’t draft women., and never has. This is why if you go by steve’s logic, you run into a problem. He says the government can call you up (draft) and therefore this means militias and professional/drafted armies are treated the same. But are they? If all the men are gone from a village, who then defends it? And what do you call the defenders?

I liked how John Ringo and David Weber put it in one of their books. They were illustrating the concept of a Praetorian Guard, and how one of the safeguards that may be used is to only tell the guards the top secrets when they get out of the service. That way they aren’t in a position to influence politics, but are able to safeguard secrets and legacies. Their organization and networks then serve the purpose of making sure the political situation remains stable, regardless of what the active military is doing.

I think this was similar to the system setup by the Founders. They put in one last check on a standing army being used to abuse people, should all the other failsafes… fail. Which was… everyone, both men and women, who were or were not in the NG/Army. They constituted a broad resource of those not active service, from which you could organize as a counter-balancing force against any standing army. Insurgency is nothing new on the face of the sun. And the fake liberal idiots who told me that no citizen organization could resist the active Marine Corps and Army (while at the same time dancing at the joy of resistance “freedom fighters” in Iraq) didn’t have a clue.

There are problems with insurgency, but hey, if you even need one, then you’re already in deep shat. So count your blessings that the FFs had a last back stop.

The militia was always a grassroots organization. A bottom up organization, so to speak, instead of the top down organization of Washington DC or even State-Local govs.

I don’t know much about language redundancies, that is Bookworm’s bailiwick. But I can reverse engineer problems such as this, using deduction. There are certain principles and goals that the FFs were bound by, both local and federal. There were things they had to do. Those points are great references if you get the logic right. The problem of a standing army in the future had to be addressed, if only because they just won a war against a standing army called the British red coats. They didn’t want something replacing it immediately, after all.

How they are treated, in effect or in actuality, has nothing to do with how they were in fact conceived. Entirely separate entities.