[betty boop]

If the 2nd Amendment was truly honoured in spirit, civilians should be able to own, maintain and use jet fighters and nuclear weapons.

Well of course they should, dear OldSpice, and that by Constitutional principle!

But the practical fact of the matter is that jet fighters and nuclear weapons, etc., are beyond the financial means and competence of everybody except the State itself. The State will ALWAYS have an advantage in this regard. And we civilians pay for/fund their privilege in this regard.

So you can wave this red flag all day long if you want to. It has no practical bearing on actual reality. It is a pure abstraction, "all sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Notwithstanding, as it turns out, no citizen nowadays can pass muster with what the Second Amendment requires of us. For, post Miller at least, what the Second Amendment requires is that citizen-held firearms must be "military-style firearms" in order to be protected by the Second Amendment.

You may recall this was the test that Miller failed to satisfy when the Supreme Court heard his case back in 1939. The Court (ironically it seems from today's perspective) found him "guilty" because it held his sawed-off shotgun was not a "military-style firearm."

I gather the Court had never before heard of the gattling gun, et al.

Notwithstanding, in United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court held that WRT private arms in citizen hands, the firearms the Second Amendment protects are preeminently those which are directly comparable to whatever state-of-the-art armaments are in use by the duly-constituted official military forces of the day.

To put this into perspective, Switzerland has long constitutionally required all able-bodied [male] citizens to own, maintain, and know how to operate military-style firearms as a basic duty of citizenship. Upshot: Nobody invades Switzerland. The Swiss citizenry is the "constitutional militia," not any other formal, government-sanctioned military body. (I do believe that Switzerland does not maintain a standing army.)

[Jeff Head]

In addition, the "advantage" of those large systems is one of little meaning unless there is a suporting population surrounding the places where the bases for those implements are held.

People who fly and maintian airfraft and missiles...or tanks for that matter...have to have food, fuel, parts, and they have to sleep, etc. as do their familes.

If their entire logistics chain is threatened and impeded by a population armed with 40 million hunting rifles...pretty soon the mechanism that supports those implements grinds to a halt.

Logisitics feeds those large systems and requires a lot of effort...a lot more than an individual rifleman and their weapon.

BTW, betty, please take a look at these two links and let me know what you think:

MY ADVISE TO THE FARMERS IN THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY

INDEPENDENT AMERICAN MOVEMENT FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RESTORATION

[Alamo-Girl]

Indeed. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!

I would add that in Israel - which is under constant threat being surrounding by people who believe they have no right to exist at all - about a quarter million residents own personal firearms.

That is a deterrent to any would-be invader.