Nothing in the 2nd Amendment prevents gun licensing & national gun registration. Yet NRA types pretend licensing and registration are tantamount to "TaKiNg AwAy OuR gUnS!!!"
It's interesting that the subject of the one-sentence 2nd Amendment is "a well regulated militia," yet most gun lovers have ZERO militia connection.
Constitutional originalists like to be guided by the wisdom of the late great Antonin Scalia, who opposed a "living" or "evolving" Constitution. Scalia said judges should look to what a law meant when it was adopted and not “to what society today thinks it ought to mean.” He also spoke of the meaning of the words as they were understood by average people at the time of adoption (of a legal text) AKA "original public meaning".
On that basis he opposed gay marriage, because that's not what marriage meant at the time marriage laws were adopted.
Which brings us to the question, what did it mean to "bear arms" in 1789? Well, you can't carry a cannon, so that's out. Bearable arms meant muskets and blunderbusses - muzzle loaders with a low refire rate. That's the sum total of the "original public meaning" of arms a person can bear.
Conservatives like to think of themselves as "keepers of the flame" of the "original Constitution." But in truth, they evolve it where they like, and try to prevent evolution where they don't like. Fact: you can't have it both ways; either the whole document evolves, or none of it, not even the Second Amendment, evolves.
