Dear Nobody:
Sorry I was not clear.
The Second Amendment mentions the militia, but as I observed a long time ago, amendments amend things. The framers were not concerned with personal self-defense, hunting, or shooting farm varmints because in 1790, those were local concerns, and the federal government was not perceived to have either power or interest in these areas. You don't amend the Constitution to prohibit a power not there in the first place.
A key argument of the early Federalists was that we did not need a Bill of Rights because specifying a short list of rights only would entice judges to say that what was not protected was fair game. So, the idea was that the framers did not want to be specifying a laundry list or rights, for fear rights generally would be imperiled.
The Ninth Amendment was Madison's genius response to this, and all it is really is a judicial rule of construction which prevents judges from arguing that, because right "X" is in the Bill of Rights, right "Y" by omission doesn't exist. The Court must use history, not logic, in approaching the subject of rights. Recall what Oliver Wendell Holmes said: "A page of history is worth a volume of logic."
That brings us to CA2 -- why does it have that little preamble in it about the militia?
The answer is that, in 1790, Congress' militia power was the power which could have been used to disarm the public. Interstate commerce could not have been so stretched, but Congress' power to "arm, equip, and discipline" the militia is plenary and complete, and the argument against the Constitution at the time [already mentioned in the plaintiffs' briefs] was that Congress could become corrupt, could use its power to raise its own troops to insure the federal government had all the tanks, mortars, and machine guns, and then pass laws limiting the militia -- the state forces -- to slings and arrows. This is why the militia is mentioned in the amendment -- it is a specific reference to the one power Congress had (in 1790) by which firearms could be prohibited.
The Second Amendment cures this potential defect; it restores the "balance of terror" by which liberty would remain "doubly secure." See further Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, No. 28, which recently has been quoted favorably by the Supreme Court on several occasions.
So, my point was not that we need to go back to an ancient concept of interstate commerce (no court will do that) but that we need to make clear why there was all this focus on the militia. Madison simply was focusing on the value to be protected, and the power which might be abused, so there really is no necessity at all that the right to keep and bear arms have a lock-step relationship with being in the militia.
The key words in the amendment are not "militia" or "RTKBA," but "free state," with the emphasis on freedom. In 1790. there had never been a bank robbery, never been a train heist, and certainly never had been any criminal demolitions of the WTC. We had no drug dealers gunning down cops on the streets, nor did we have drive-by shootings. But, there had been tyrants aplenty, and as a matter of history, it is natural for the framers of the amendment to focus on what the problem was perceived to be, and not what the problem might be if someday interstate commerce might apply or global terrorism or crime become the principal concern of the day.
I do not believe we should be arguing against modern concepts of "commerce." But, I do think we should make known to the Court that there is an historical reason why the framers focused on the militia and militia powers. They were simply thinking in terms of how the Constitution reasonably might be construed to defeat the values they all had shed so much blood and treasure to secure from the King of England. And certainly one of the most important values was that standing armies should not be allowed, and that an armed populace should be the substitute in its place. Even back then, they knew the saying: "Switzerland does not have an army; Switzerland is an army." In this way, the Government always would keep the civil superior to the military authority (an essential feature of any republic).