State governments of the United States in the context of "Second Amendment to the United States Constitution"

The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, on March 4, 1789. Originally including seven articles, the Constitution defined the foundational structure of the federal government.

The drafting of the Constitution by many of the nation's Founding Fathers, often referred to as its framing, was completed at the Constitutional Convention, which assembled at Independence Hall in Philadelphia between May 25 and September 17, 1787. Influenced by English common law and the Enlightenment liberalism of philosophers like John Locke and Montesquieu, the Constitution's first three articles embody the doctrine of the separation of powers, in which the federal government is divided into the legislative, bicameral Congress; the executive, led by the president; and the judiciary, within which the Supreme Court has apex jurisdiction. Articles IV, V, and VI embody concepts of federalism, describing the rights and responsibilities of state governments, the states in relationship to the federal government, and the process of constitutional amendment. Article VII establishes the procedure used to ratify the constitution.

In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sovereignty with the federal government. Due to this shared sovereignty, Americans are citizens both of the federal republic and of the state in which they reside. State citizenship and residency are flexible, and no government approval is required to move between states, except for persons restricted by certain types of court orders, such as paroled convicts and children of divorced spouses who share child custody.

State governments in the U.S. are allocated power by the people of each respective state through their individual state constitutions. All are grounded in republican principles (this being required by the federal constitution), and each provides for a government, consisting of three branches, each with separate and independent powers: executive, legislative, and judicial. States are divided into counties or county-equivalents, which may be assigned some local governmental authority but are not sovereign. County or county-equivalent structure varies widely by state, and states also create other local governments.

In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the Tenth Amendment. The enumerated powers that are listed in the Constitution include exclusive federal powers, as well as concurrent powers that are shared with the states, and all of those powers are contrasted with the reserved powers—also called states' rights—that only the states possess. Since the 1940s, the term "states' rights" has often been considered a loaded term, a euphemism, or a dog whistle because of its use in opposition to federally-mandated racial desegregation and, more recently, same-sex marriage and reproductive rights.

In the United States, politics functions within a framework of a constitutional federal democratic republic with a presidential system. The three distinct branches share powers: Congress, which forms the legislative branch, a bicameral legislative body comprising the House of Representatives and the Senate; the executive branch, which is headed by the president of the United States, who serves as the country's head of state and government; and the judicial branch, composed of the Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and which exercises judicial power.

Each of the 50 individual state governments has the power to make laws within its jurisdiction that are not granted to the federal government nor denied to the states in the U.S. Constitution. Each state also has a constitution following the pattern of the federal constitution but differing in details. Each has three branches: an executive branch headed by a governor, a legislative body, and a judicial branch. At the local level, governments are found in counties or county-equivalents, and beneath them individual municipalities, county, townships, school districts, and special districts.

An Indian reservation in the United States is an area of land held and governed by a Native American tribal nation officially recognized by the U.S. federal government. The reservation's government is autonomous but subject to regulations passed by the United States Congress, and is administered by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is not subject, however, to a state or local government of the U.S. state in which it is located. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one of the 326 Indian reservations in the United States, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. Historical piecemeal land allocations under the Dawes Act facilitated sales to non–Native Americans, resulting in some reservations becoming severely fragmented, with pieces of tribal and privately held land being treated as separate enclaves. This intersection of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.

The total area of all reservations is 56,200,000 acres (22,700,000 ha; 87,800 sq mi; 227,000 km), approximately 2.3% of the total area of the United States and about the size of the state of Idaho. While most reservations are small compared to the average U.S. state, twelve Indian reservations are larger than the state of Rhode Island. The largest reservation, the Navajo Nation Reservation, is similar in size to the state of West Virginia. Reservations are unevenly distributed throughout the country, the majority being situated west of the Mississippi River and occupying lands that were first reserved by treaty (Indian Land Grants) from the public domain.

In the United States, state law refers to the law of each separate U.S. state.

The fifty states are separate sovereigns, with their own state constitutions, state governments, and state courts. All states have a legislative branch which enacts state statutes, an executive branch that promulgates state regulations pursuant to statutory authorization, and a judicial branch that applies, interprets, and occasionally overturns both state statutes and regulations, as well as local ordinances. States retain the power to make laws covering anything not otherwise preempted by the federal Constitution, federal statutes, or international treaties ratified by the federal Senate. Normally, state supreme courts are the final interpreters of state institutions and state law, unless their interpretation itself presents a federal issue, in which case a decision may be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by way of a petition for writ of certiorari. State courts regularly have concurrent jurisdiction with federal courts and, where applicable, apply or are also bound by federal law. State laws have dramatically diverged in the centuries since independence, to the extent that the United States cannot be regarded as one legal system (as to the majority of types of law traditionally under state control), but instead as 50 separate systems of tort law, family law, property law, contract law, criminal law, and so on.

A state of the United States is one of the 50 constituent entities that shares its sovereignty with the federal government. Americans are citizens of both the federal republic and of the state in which they reside, due to the shared sovereignty between each state and the federal government. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia use the term commonwealth rather than state in their full official names.

States are the primary subdivisions of the United States. They possess all powers not granted to the federal government nor prohibited to them by the Constitution of the United States. In general, state governments have the power to regulate issues of local concern, such as regulating intrastate commerce, running elections, creating local governments, public school policy, and non-federal road construction and maintenance. Each state has its own constitution grounded in republican principles, and government consisting of executive, legislative, and judicial branches.