The problem with wording of the 2nd Ammendment isn't as much the right to bear arms but the way it is tied to maintaining a militia... This is why 4 justices interpreted the wording diffently from the the other 5...

The wording is not at all clear as the Founder's intent...

Now if we take the Constitution and look at it from a historical perspective it gets even more difficult to apply the 2nd ammendment to today... First of all, handguns were rare back then... Most were kept on fancy boxes and used for dueling or occasional sport shooting... And they were loaded from the barrel... The militias of the day used muzzle loading rifles... This was the reality of the times in which this document was written... When we try to figure out how the Founding Fathers would have us live and bahave in our modern world we need to try to think like they would think if they were still with us...

Keep in mind that Thomas Jefferson wrote that it was his opinion that the Constitution was not a document that would stand the test of time and that from time to time we would need to ammmend it to keep it relevant... It is my opinion that Jefferson would give us no greater than a B- or C+ in keeping the document modern...

I think it was Tolstoy that siad that governemnt is like the caboose of the train and I guess that is why we have been slow to make the changes necessary to keep the Constitution relevant to our times and that is problematic in that we have become so polorized that it is no longer possible to ammend the Constitution to keep it modern and we therefore are slaves to our own past and, as a result, are in danger of being consumed by dogmatism...

B~