I'm no Constitutional scholar, but wrt your statement:
It is unclear whether the Second Amendment allows citizens to own arms or whether it allows well regulated militias to own arms.
it would appear that you might give a bit more study to the origins of the Second Amendment. It's origins are in English Law...it was not a pure invention of our Founding Fathers. There being no "states" in England...the right was given to the people pure and simple. One further needs to remember that the Bill of Rights were amendments meant to guarantee rights that had not been addressed in the original document, and that the Framers felt were significant enough to be so.
Take it just a bit further. The body of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, repeatedly refers to "the people" and in the tenth, a rather clear distinction is made of the meaning of "the people" as individuals, not as in collections of individuals. Militia, in the 18th Century, referred to all citizens between the ages of 18 and 45, not those acting as a collection of individuals. A contemporaneous interpretation of "the people" would have been "you and me." Your right to such things as free speech, to withhold self-incriminating testimony, to a speedy trial, should they ever become unpopular, could one day be on a revisionist list.
The following, from a UCLA Law Professor, was published by the WSJ in 1999 and may clarify some of this for you.
http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/gunconst.htm
chaz |
