this is from a GA case and gives a little background on your right as an Englishmen......
If this right, "inestimable to freemen," has been guarantied to British subjects, since the abdication and flight of the last of the Stuarts and the ascension of the Prince of Orange, did it not belong to our colonial ancestors in this western hemisphere? Has it been a part of the English Constitution ever since the bill of rights and act of settlement? and been forfeited here by the substitution and adoption of our own Constitution? No notion can be more fallacious than this! On the contrary, this is one of the fundamental principles, upon which rests the great fabric of civil liberty, reared by the fathers of the Revolution and of the country. And the Constitution of the United States, in declaring that the right of the people to keep and bear arms, should not be infringed, only reiterated a truth announced a century before, in the act of 1689, "to extend and secure the rights and liberties of English subjects"-whether living 3,000 or 300 miles from the royal palace. And it is worthy of observation, that both charters or compacts look to the same motive, for the irrespective enactments. The act of 1 William and Mary, declares that it is against law to raise or keep a standing army in the kingdom, in time of peace without the consent of Parliament, and therefore places arms in the hands of the people; and our Constitution assigns as a reason why this right shall not be interfered with, or in any manner abridged, that the free enjoyment of it will prepare and qualify a well-regulated militia, which are necessary to the security of a free State.
