The Second Militia Act of 1792 clarified that assumption somewhat when it specified all free able-bodied white male citizens must be part of their local militia and are required to own a gun among other things.

What they couldn't have predicted is that the Bill of Rights would also apply to the individual state and local governments since that wasn't true until the 14th amendment almost 100 years later and didn't really kick off until the 1900s. This is obviously important to understand what the original amendments mean.

That's interesting. What is a reasonable alternative interpretation of "the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" than individual gun ownership though?

"The people" here were the states - the point was that the states could maintain their own militia (the modern day national guard). The 2nd amendment has been bastardized by a radical judiciary that is now unfortunately too entrenched to fix without repealing the 2A.

The supreme court ruled that the first clause of the 2nd amendment was just flavor text. We aren't going to be Switzerland, which has an actual armed militia where kids take military-issued guns into their community to support it (on the train even! although the bullets are kept somewhere else to reduce a suicide problem they had a few years ago).

I was responding to an assertion that the amendment authors must have known the implications of what they were writing. It’s irrelevant what a subsequent Supreme Court interpretation was to that point.

The Supreme court formally declared that the amendment authors wrote the amendment with the first clause of the second amendment as meaningless flavor text. It is obviously revisionist and I hope it doesn't hold for more than a few generations or so (assuming the USA survives).

I think that’s pretty much the only way you can make that work? I’m against gun ownership, but I feel like you really need to stretch things to read that any other way than ‘people shall be allowed to own their own guns’

I almost don’t want to respond since this is well trodden ground, but I would say that “a well regulated militia” casts doubt on the individual gun ownership interpretation. You have to decide who the militia exists to fight and therefore who should regulate them. It’s obviously not obvious though.

“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I dunno, this one is a whole lot less open to interpretation than the first sentence

It's not. "The people" is a collective term, so this unambiguously says that collectively the people have the right to keep and bear arms, i.e. as a group. For example, maybe this guarantees that a well regulated militia of the people has the right keep and bear arms. An example of a less ambiguous statement would be: "the right of all individual people to keep and bear arms".

We know who the militia existed to fight.

The term "well-regulated milita" predates the constitution and traces back to the days when white people were often a substantial minority compared to the populations of enslaved black people they lived among.

On St Croix where a young man named Alexander Hamilton grew up, the ratio was 1 free person to 8 slaves, so the well-regulated militia was to assemble at the fortress if they heard a blast of the cannon: they were required to come with their weapons in order to put down a slave revolt.

Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.

It's also probably worth mentioning that "people" in "the right of the people" certainly excluded slaves from the right to own weapons, making the text even more burdened by its own history

My point is: what the founders understood was that some gun violence was the unavoidable cost of maintaining the system of slavery, itself a system of formalized/normalized political violence.