much a dead issue as far as scholarship goes. Then, there came all this "new scholarship" in the 1990s.

Actually, the confusion probably began back in the 50s and 60s when the term "citizen soldiers" came to mean draftees.

Excuse me. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Book V, Ch. 1, contains an extended account of the Militia. It is there said: "Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty." "In a militia, the character of the labourer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character; and in this distinction seems to consist the essential difference between those two different species of military force."

That is the standing army v. themilitia, the professional soldiers v. the amateurs. The militias are the citizen soldiers, as distinguished from those trained to arms as a profession, and who constitute elements of a standing army. Since both the States and Congress shared concurrent authorities over the militia, it was essential to protect the people who made up the militias from any pretense of Congress in disarming them for the establishment of a standing army.

Now, with Iraq, which is a perfect example of what the founders were afraid of in the debates, an out of control leader with a standing army running amuck, and Virginia Tech, which isn't what the founders had in mind, doesn't this seem particularly germane?

I mean who stands to gain from all this if the Second Amendment is not