Willravel

Ah but that's the idea behind a perminant standing army. No one knows what to do in times of peace, and the pressure is always on to be in conflict with someone or something to justify it's existence, it's size, it's cost. For the last 50 years, it was the spread of Communism. Even though democracy and communism can very easily coexist in peace, both sides spun that the other was evil and godless and was an immediate threat....therefore we both became a threat to one another. Had the Soviet Union and the US been close allies instead of continued threats to one another, what reason would there have been for the building up military? Now that the Soviet Union has been collapsed for over a decade, the new threat is global muslim extreemism in the form of terrorism. Even though it's perfectly obvious to anyone who stops and thinks about it, the military will continue to grow and develop new and more powerful weapons to fight terrorism. Of course, we already know how effective conventional military is against terrorism: it's crap. We had fighters all over the US capable of supersonic speeds and blowing a flea off the side of a warship....but they couldn't get a few slow moving commercial liners. I mean the Pentagon, the center of all US inteligence, was hit with a commercial plane long after the WTC towers fell. It should have taken maybe 7-8 minutes to get over the Pentagon....but it they couldn't get there in over an hour. It was was silly. Assuming you don't subscribe to my conspiracy leanings, no military planes were sent up upon learning of a third hijacked plane, after 2 planes had hit the WTC. That means that we wer powerless against the greatest terrorist attack on US soil in history.
Let's say that you have the biggest, most powerful military in the world. Againt you, no conventional military could hope to stand. You could even take on the second, third, and fourth most powerful militaries in the world at once and win. Let's also say that this military is massively expensive. It's so powerful that it's bankrupting your country. Also, the military spending is involved in a revolving door policy between the weapons manufacturers and politicans. In order for the manufacturers, and thus the politicans, to get madly rich, they need to constantly be increasing spending. How coud they possibly justify this in a time of war? That's simple. We seek out enemies. We even create them. We are in a constant state of conflict. But what happens when everyone is subserviant? What happens when we eventually nuke the ME, and China, and Europe? The we turn on ourselves. There has always been healthy descent among Americans because of free speech. I can go out and say that the war in Iraq is wrong, and no one shoots me (yet). Of course, now that it's legal to break the Geneva Convention, Habaes Corpus, etc. What does that mean? I can be arrested for protesting, and they can use ridiculous military and/or police force to get me.

I think the interesting part is that the founders understood the dangers of a standing military hundreds of years ago. These were some amazingly brillient men.
As long as people can buy simple, household items, we will have the ability. Guns are hardly the only weapon of insurgency, and if the government already knows that you have some, you won't be able to do much.