There are two principal sane legal Constitutional arguments about the 2nd Amendment.
One says that no American has any right to a gun under the Second Amendment as the Amendment was fulfilled in 1876.
The second states that the amendment was written for another time and is no longer relevant today, but nevertheless, serious attempts at gun control would necessitate overturning the 2nd Amendment.
There are other arguments out there argument by rightwing hacks who call themselves Constitutional scholars. This arguments are crazy, like most things conservatives say, and in my opinion, they hold no legal value whatsoever. They are wholly specious. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has already argued some extremely stupid, irresponsible and legally invalid cases on the 2nd Amendment and the Court simply tends to follow precedent on this matter. One of the worst cases of all took place I believe in the 1930’s.
This is a Constitutional argument, and the argument goes on both sides.
For the first argument, I have actually read some very good legal arguments that say that the Founders really were so crazy as to believe that the militia meant nothing more than the local guys armed with guns. Not that they thought that that militia was necessary to protect the people from the state or anything like that but that that is exactly what they had in mind when they wrote the Amendment – that the militia or guard was really only going to be the people themselves.
However, if the intention at the time was for the militia to be nothing more than the local guys and their guns at home, then the 2nd Amendment is frozen in time. It is frozen in a time that is no longer relevant to our modern era, like so much of the Constitution. However, a strict Constitutionalist reading could be that at the time they had no notion of a guard other than the local men and their guns at home, and that the amendment was intended to allow for such a guard, and if we were to have a guard, local men would have to keep guns at home in case they got called up.
According to this argument, the founders never intended for every house to have guns to protect themselves. The guns were only for the men of the house in case they needed to be called up for the local guard.
Nevertheless, this argument states that you still can’t take guns away anyway because of the amendment and that any effort to control guns would necessitate the overturning of this amendment. This argument is that the 2nd Amendment really is nutty in that it is frozen in time and that it refers to an era that no longer exists.
The second argument is that the 2nd Amendment simply calls for a National Guard. At the time, the National Guard was simply whatever local guys were around and their muskets. They had no concept of a guard other than that.
In 1876, an actual National Guard was put into place. This argument states that the 2nd Amendment was fulfilled on that date in 1876 and that the people no longer had any right to have any sort of guns as we no longer need an informal citizen’s militia as we have a professional citizen’s militia.
I am not aware of any evidence anywhere in Constitutional discussions that stated that people all needed to be armed in order to be able to overthrow the government at any time that they thought the state was getting out of hand. That seems quite irresponsible.
This is the gun nut argument – that the Founders were so nuts and irresponsible that they thought that the citizenry should be armed to the teeth and use their guns to stage violent revolutions and overthrow the democratic state by force any time they didn’t like what was going on. I am quite sure that that was not their intention, as if it was, that would be one of the most irresponsible Constitutional sections ever written in the history of man.
As I said though, the argument among the sane people is presently divided into two groups, one that says that the 2nd Amendment has been fulfilled and no one has a right to have a gun, and the other that says that lamentably, this outdated, no longer relevant, frozen in time amendment would need to be overturned for any serious efforts at gun control.