States armed conflicts between

According to media reports, the hospital ship USNS Comfort, prior to her deployment in the course of the 2003 international armed conflict between Iraq and the United States, was equipped with weapons like. 30-cal. and. 50-cal machine guns [...], exclusively for defence, to fend off attacks by swarming, heavily armed speed boats or suicide craft see Sirak 2003. 

Currently only the Fifth Circuit (see U.S. v. Emerson) has upheld an individual right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment. If the Supreme Court should eventually resolve the conflict between the circuits in favor of this interpretation, a stricter test would presumably be applied to state gun laws. Of course, some regulations might still pass such scrutiny. 

Carmer, Clayton E. For the Defense of Themselves and the State The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. West-port, Conn. Praeger Publishers, 1994. Explores the conflict between the original intent of the Second Amendment, well established by scholarship as conferring an individual right to keep and bear arms, and the judicial interpretation of the Supreme Court and most other courts that have pre-... 

The main theme of this chapter was to clarify the extent to which a State may exercise its discretion to withhold consent to humanitarian activities to be carried out on its territory during armed conflict, in the light of the principle of State sovereignty under general international law, and IHL. It also addressed the interplay between the principle of sovereignty and IHL and clarified the extent to which IHL limits the exercise of the sovereign right of a State to control the entry of external actors into that State s territory. 

Note that the term internal is used to designate an armed conflict within the territory of a single state, between the government and a non-state actor and not any non-intemational conflict, which may include an armed conflict across borders between a government and a non-state actor. 

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