Commando weapons.

I just finished reading Grapes of Wrath.  Among the thoughts provoked was another affirmation of the necessity of a well-regulated militia.  There's a conflict between what armed men will organize to accomplish and what powerful men will arm minions to accomplish.  I think of Bacon's Rebellion, where Gov. Berkeley laments his inability to raise an army to suppress rebellion, lacking the funds.  I think of the army Tom Cruise's character was hired to train in The Last Samurai.  I think of Pinkertons and other hired goons which have been assembled to suppress organized labor.  The age old question of whether one is served by participating in the communistic system of corporations and big capital with their central planning and bureaucratic means of stratification, or with voluntary associations in the free-enterprise system of guilds and small private capital (I like to think of garages and green grocers).

The problem is that scabs and goons-for-hire are likely to be "rugged individualists" in their own mind, prey to monetized (mercenary) transactions, as opposed to filial associations of the folks fighting the encroachment of avarice-based structure of society.  It's the folks who accumulate arsenals who are least likely to commit them to constructive use (do weapons have constructive use?)  Anyhow -- non-governmental (or proto-governmental like Revolutionary Committees of Safety) militia is a worthy form for organizing the liberals and progressives among us whose ends are gracious, if not altruistic.  Though a militia with a central body on the order of an Occupy Movement General Assembly sounds like a circular firing squad.

The point being that Sons of Liberty type right-wing groups and Committee of Safety type centrist groups and SDS/Black Panther type left-wing groups all have reason to bear arms, and American ideals are served by the presence of such armed groups, but the Second Amendment supposes infantry, not commandos.  Weapons whose purpose is individual carnage are not part of what I cherish as a right of free-association.  Automatic and large magazine weapons are not infantry weapons -- they are commando weapons.  They are mass murder weapons.  They are terror weapons.  They are weapons for which I will support restrictions.  I do not support restricting persons.  Be it felons or psychotics or even sociopaths.  Especially psychotics.  Perhaps when the rights of psychotics to assemble in armed non-governmental well-regulated militias are established, other rights will be less vulnerable.  I will not be disarmed by being called Schizo.  I've been called that all my life, though have been repeatedly assured by doctors I'm not clinically such.  Or legally such.  But I still feel comradeship with those who share this label, and especially those for whom that label has deprived of society's respect and a citizen's privileges and immunities.