The origin of the 2nd was originally modeled on Parliament's right to arm a militia to defend its rights against transgressions by the crown. There was a concern about the federal army being used to create a tyranny, but southerners were probably mostly worried that it would not be a reliable defense against potential slave rebellions, always a concern of plantation owners. There was a lot of mistrust that northern abolitionists would stand by pledges not to meddle in their perceived need for slave labor. Southern polititians had blocked efforts in the past to train slaves to fight for the Revolution in exchange for freedom. Such soldiers could have then used their military training against former masters.
The second amendment was never a guarantee of anything but the right to form and train militias in common defense of property and safety.
Even assuming you are correct, it's academic anyway, because I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court interprets it as giving individual rights to defence. So you have to accept that such is Constitutional law, even if it's a mistake. The same with abortion rights. It's the law even if it's judicial nonsense.
Quote:
For most of the republic’s lifespan, from 1791 to 2008, those commas and clauses were debated by attorneys and senators, slave owners and freedmen, judges, Black Panthers, governors and lobbyists. For some, the militia was key; for others the right that shall not be infringed; for yet others, the question of states versus the federal government. For the most part, the supreme court stayed out it.
“Americans have been thinking about the second amendment as an individual right for generations,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “You can find state supreme courts in the mid-1800s where judges say the second amendment protects an individual right.”
But for the 70 years or so before a supreme court decision in 2008, he said, “the supreme court and federal courts held that it only applied in the context of militias, the right of states to protect themselves from federal interference”.
In 2008, the supreme court decided the District of Columbia v Heller, 5-4 , overturning a handgun ban in the city. The conservative justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion in narrow but unprecedented terms: for the first time in the country’s history, the supreme court explicitly affirmed an individual’s right to keep a weapon at home for self-defense....
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/05/second-amendment-right-to-bear-arms-meaning-history
Quote:
For most of the last century, the meaning of the Second Amendment was not particularly controversial: the courts, legal scholars, politicians, and historians endorsed some version of the collective rights interpretation. As late as 1991, Chief Justice Warren Burger described the individual rights view as an intellectual fraud. Yet, the growth of a revisionist individual rights theory of the Second Amendment in the years since Burger made his comment has been nothing short of astonishing.
This view was originally propagated by gun rights activists such as Stephen Halbrook, Don Kates, and David Kopel whose research was funded by libertarian think tanks and the National Rifle Association (NRA).
In the decade before Burger's attack, these activists had published law review articles at a dizzying rate arguing for an individual rights view. The NRA even endowed a chair in Second Amendment studies at George Mason Law School with the express purpose of supporting this viewpoint. As the paper trail supporting this view grew longer, the individualist perspective started to gain some traction among prominent liberals.
When Harvard Law School's Lawrence Tribe, a renowned liberal, acknowledged the legitimacy of this view in 2005, the long road from Burger's "intellectual fraud" to constitutional mainstream had ended. There is no doubt that the individual rights view is now eminently respectable.
For several reasons, opponents of this interpretation were slow to respond: confidence that the individual rights view would never attract judicial notice, a general decline in interest in constitutional history outside law schools, and a general lack of funds to support research on this topic all hampered scholarship. Despite these obstacles, historians began to turn their attention to the Second Amendment and new funding for research on this topic led to a revival of scholarly interest and a more robust debate.
Scholarship on the Second Amendment is now is deeply divided. Indeed, there is currently a broad spectrum of views on the meaning of the Second Amendment running from an expansive individual rights view to the traditional collective rights view, and a host of new positions somewhere in the middle. While many law professors support the individual rights view, most historians reject this interpretation as an anachronistic reading of the amendment and its history....
https://origins.osu.edu/print/836
I thought this second quote was interesting for the history-of-interpretation it gives, but of course it may be somewhat biased in its perspective.