NRA forgets no one is free from laws

When I read that the father of one of the Sandy Hook students killed was heckled by some people shouting "Second Amendment" because he asked why anyone needed an assault weapon, I was stick to my stomach. This is what keeps getting missed in the debate. They do not need them. They just want them. If the shooter at Sandy Hook did not have the ability to take his Mom's legal assault weapons to the school that day and only had regular rifles or handguns, the teachers would have had a fighting chance to stop him. He'd have to reload. One more thing getting missed in the claim that arming teachers is the way to go since they will have only handguns but murders will show up with this slaughter machine. Cops don't even have them. They have to call in SWAT. The Second Amendment does not void the first. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The language of the Second Amendment, as adopted, read:

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.

English history made two things clear to the American revolutionaries: force of arms was the only effective check on government, and standing armies threatened liberty.

Recognition of these premises meant that the force of arms necessary to check government had to be placed in the hands of citizens. The English theorists Blackstone and Harrington advocated these tenants. Because the public purpose of the right to keep arms was to check government, the right necessarily belonged to the individual and, as a matter of theory, was thought to be absolute in that it could not be abrogated by the prevailing rulers.

These views were adopted by the framers, both Federalists and Antifederalists. Neither group trusted government. Both believed the greatest danger to the new republic was tyrannical government and that the ultimate check on tyranny was an armed population. It is beyond dispute that the second amendment right was to serve the same public purpose as advocated by the English theorists. The check on all government, not simply the federal government, was the armed population, the militia. Government would not be accorded the power to create a select militia since such a body would become the government's instrument. The whole of the population would comprise the militia. As the constitutional debates prove, the framers recognized that the common public purpose of preserving freedom would be served by protecting each individual's right to arms, thus empowering the people to resist tyranny and preserve the republic. The intent was not to create a right for other (pg.1039) governments, the individual states; it was to preserve the people's right to a free state, just as it says.

This is what "regulated means.

regulated
Control or maintain the rate or speed of (a machine or process) so that it operates properly. Control or supervise (something, esp. a company or business activity) by means of rules and regulations.

Standing Army

Convinced that preparedness deterred war, nationalists wanted a standing Navy to match the standing Army. But the United States still had no navy in 1793 when trouble loomed on two fronts. First, the French Revolution exploded into a world war, putting neutral American commerce at risk. Second, with the Europeans preoccupied, the Barbary state pirates, whom the European powers had earlier bottled up in the Mediterranean Sea, were now sending their ships into the Atlantic to prey on American shipping. In response to this dual crisis, Congress passed a Naval Act on March 27, 1794 authorizing the construction of six frigates; each frigate was to have a Marine detachment of one officer and approximately fifty enlisted men. Those six frigates had a tangled history, but a reasonable argument can be made that the 1794 Naval Act marked the real birth date of an American Navy.

Finally, as the Quasi-War with France approached in 1798, Congress passed a spate of military preparedness legislation. Among other things, it dramatically increased the naval forces. Until then the Secretary of War handled both land and naval affairs. To ease the secretary’s burgeoning administrative burden, Congress cleaved the Secretary of War’s responsibilities in half by creating a separate Department of Navy. Then on July 11, 1798 Congress passed a law organizing the Navy’s Marines as a Corps of Marines, thus marking the real birth of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Conclusion
The Constitution initially threw those who embraced Radical Whig ideology into the deepest, most profound depths of despair. They feared that the United States would soon have “a military king, with a standing army devoted to his will,” which he would use to suppress civil liberties.[3]Exercising its explicit authority and ample power, the new Constitutional government overrode Radical Whig fears to create a regular standing Army (that is, a permanent army that existed in both war and peace), a regular standing Navy, and a regular standing Marine Corps. But as it has turned out, for more than two centuries and counting, it created neither tyranny nor a despotic government.

In closing, we do have a Standing Army and they need the weapons to fight our battles but even they do not agree on what civilians should and should not have.

In interviews with various media outlets McChrystal drew no hard distinctions between the AR-15 and M4, both of which fire a .223 caliber round.

"We've got to take a serious look -- I understand everyone's desire to have whatever [weapon] they want -- but we've got to protect our children, we've got to protect our police, we've got to protect our population," McChrystal said during an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe earlier this month. "Serious action is necessary. Sometimes we talk about very limited actions on the edges and I just don't think that's enough."

This was taken from this article

Green Beret Group Lobbies Against Gun Control
Jan 29, 2013
Military.com
by Bryant Jordan

More than 1,100 former and current Army Special Forces troops -- Green Berets -- have reportedly put their names to a letter condemning any efforts to restrict gun ownership following the massacre of 20 students and six staff at Sandy Hill Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

The 2,900-word letter has been distributed to media outlets and posted on Professionalsoldiers.com, which is operated by retired Army Special Forces Master Sgt. Jeff Hinton. Because of the sensitive nature of their military careers the names of those signing the letter are not being released.

Hinton -- who has routinely exposed phony Green Berets and others on his website -- said he has confirmed that everyone who put his name to the letter is a current or former Special Forces soldier. Military.com could not validate all 1,100 names by press time.