But you can't parse Constitutional Ammendments like that. They have to be taken as a whole. Even if no one disagrees with the idea that militias need to be armed that still has a bearing on the ammendment as a whole. Under a very strict reading of that ammendment it could be determined that citizens can own guns but cannot use them except in service of the militia. Plus the term "arms" doesn't just mean guns. It could mean everything from pointy sticks to nukes. Thanks Mulder for the background info on the 2nd Ammendment. I would also recommend people read Federalist Paper 29 on the subject too.
Probably not but then again the Supreme Court has never really struck down gun control so they aren't exactly endorsing a really liberal interpretation of the amendment. Also, the only major time where the supreme court struck down gun control, it was in the lopez decision which was done so on federalism grounds rather than 2nd amendment grounds
The best examination of the second amendment I have found is an essay published in the Yale Law Journal entitled The Embarassing Second Ammendment. It can be found in PDF form here. The following is the section that contains the essential argument of the text: [rquoter] There is one further problem of no small import: if one does accept the plausibility of any of the arguments on behalf of a strong reading of the Second Amendment, but, nevertheless, rejects them in the name of social prudence and the present-day consequences produced by finicky adherence to earlier understandings, why do we not apply such consequentialist criteria to each and every part of the Bill of Rights? As Ronald Dworkin has argued, what it means to take rights seriously is that one will honor them even when there is significant social cost in doing so. If protecting freedom of speech, the rights of criminal defendants, or any other part of the Bill of Rights were always (or even most of the time) clearly costless to the society as a whole, it would truly be impossible to understand why they would be as controversial as they are. The very fact that there are often significant costs—criminals going free, oppressed groups having to hear viciously racist speech and so on—helps to account for the observed fact that those who view themselves as defenders of the Bill of Rights are generally antagonistic to prudential arguments. Most often, one finds them embracing versions of textual, historical, or doctrinal argument that dismiss as almost crass and vulgar any insistence that times might have changed and made too "expensive" the continued adherence to a given view. "Cost-benefit" analysis, rightly or wrongly, has come to be viewed as a "conservative" weapon to attack liberal rights. Yet one finds that the tables are strikingly turned when the Second Amendment comes into play. Here it is "conservatives" who argue in effect that social costs are irrelevant and "liberals" who argue for a notion of the "living Constitution" and "changed circumstances" that would have the practical consequence of removing any real bite from the Second Amendment. As Fred Donaldson of Austin, Texas wrote, commenting on those who defended the Supreme Court's decision upholding flag-burning as compelled by a proper (and decidedly non-prudential) understanding of the First Amendment, "t seems inconsistent for [defenders of the decision] to scream so loudly" at the prospect of limiting the protection given expression "while you smile complacently at the Second torn and bleeding. If the Second Amendment is not worth the paper it is written on, what price the First?" [/rquoter] Essentially the arguement is that if you value any of the rights granted in the Constitution as inalienable and unencroachable you have to protect all of them, particularly the ones you don't like and the ones that are not favorable to whatever measure of utility or worth you choose to use.
