The Gun Counter

Any arguments that it doesn't clearly apply to individual right to bear arms (both on personal property and in public) pretty much reduces to either ignorance, wishful thinking or sophistry.

So the real discussion isn't about the meaning of the 2nd but rather a personal belief/values view of whether it should be there at all (or not).

Yes you could buy a cannon when the 2nd Amendment was ratified, Mr Biden. You are either a liar or ignorant. After years of you saying how smart you are, it must be the former.

Three words in the Constitution which help frame the discussion on the ability of 'civilians' to purchase weapons of war, up to and including (at least) naval artillery:

Article I, § 8, clause 11, (Enumerated powers) wrote: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Congress can still grant a private citizen, owning a ship equipped and manned for war (which included at the time of the adoption of the Constitution the cannons, mortars, muskets, rifles, swords, cutlasses... etc. ad nauseum) permission to attack the ships of another nation on their behalf. It is therefore ridiculous to believe that the same founding fathers who enumerated the power for Congress to do this believed in anything other than the individual right to own arms. Of all types, shapes, sizes, capabilities...

and yet here we are.

What did the British intend to seize in Lexington and Concord, and from whom?

Another thing I read recently is that the modern practice of putting all of the Amendments, especially the Bill of Rights, as a separate list of items outside the main document.

They weren't intended to stand like that at all. Madison intended most of what we now call the Bill of Rights to be inserted into Article I, Section 9 - the section that lists the things Congress isn't allowed to do. It does, to me at least, reinforce the concept that it doesn't grant any right, but rather is a restriction on the .gov.

This is in keeping with the standard practice for how existing laws are changed.