Would publishing the personal information...

[Atypical Liberal]

129. It's a problem for anyone who wants to restrict the right to keep and bear arms.

That's not my problem, and it doesn't have anything to do with my points.

I was addressing your statement, "Your original answer was an unsupported assertion that "there are no militias". If you can prove that, then we can get into semantics."

And that statement is incorrect. The militia system that existed during the founders' day was dismantled with the passage of the Dick Act in 1903. It was undertaken ostensibly because the state-run militias systems had run into disrepair. Militias were expensive to train and equip, and so some states did so better than others. Additionally, people had ceased to show up for regular militia drill and many had become little more than social gatherings rather than military training exercises.

Thus the United States could not undertake foreign expeditions efficiently (which was probably one of of the motivations of the founders. Imagine how many foreign entanglements we might have avoided through history if all the states had to equally agree on supporting them.)

The Dick Act dismantled the militia system and created the Organized Militia (the National Guard), and the Unorganized Militia (all able-bodied men aged 17-45 not otherwise in the Organized Militia). Some states sill retain wording in their constitutions to provide for state militias, though I am unaware of any formal state-run militia training programs.

But the fact is that the militias as they existed in the founders' day - state-run military institutions designed to eliminate or counter federal military power - no longer exist.

If the USA has a giant, only VAGUELY Constitutional standing army, that problem should be fixed.

It should indeed. But until that time, the second amendment still reserves the right to keep and bear arms to the people.

I am convinced this was intentional. The second amendment reads:

"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."

It would have been trivial to say that the right of the state, or the right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. But the founders did not do that. They said the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. No doubt this was because they envisioned the possibility of the institutions of government becoming corrupt, but saw the people as the ultimate repository of force to protect their freedom.

So your problem, and the problem for everyone who keeps and bears arms, is that even though the first clause of the second amendment no longer applies, it does not negate the second clause.

This is why the argument that people often float that citizens can only bear arms in relation to service in a militia is wrong. Even if it were the intent of the second amendment (which it isn't), it doesn't matter because the militias spoken about in the second amendment no longer exist.

Now, if you are going to say that because those militias no longer exist, the right to keep and bear arms also no longer exists, that is another subject to be defended.