I don't know a soul who belongs to any sort of official state militia. Do you?
At the time, the colonies had fought largely organized as state militias because, by definition, they had not had any sort of state sanctioned military or independent police force. Much of their focus was on preserving their arms and ammunition because that was such a target of the British in the Revolutionary War.
Naturally, they feared giving to the new federal government the same power that had been attempted to be exercised against them by King George and British Parliament.
Viewed through the lens of modern America, I simply cannot equate those concerns with anything today. Only complete a-hole nutjobs think they need to keep a gun to fend off the federal government. They might trot that out there to wrap themselves in the flag, but they are mostly liars and vigilante types.
Having said that, this means only that I do not attach to the Second Amendment some type of carte blanche authorization for people to have any gun they damn well please. Rather, I think it means that a state can maintain a store of arms for purposes of fending off any sort of federal government military incursion into the homes of their citizens, a rare and obsolete worry, to be sure.
As to private citizens, therefore, I see no Constitutional restriction on a state's ability to restrict individual gun ownership. Therefore, I would say that a state government should be permitted to bar private ownership of firearms or, much more likely, restrict ownership severely.
I think that, in the case of handguns, there is a legitimate debate to be had in any given state as to whether private ownership of them should be permitted basically at all.
I tend to think all states would allow it, as it would be incredibly politically unpopular at the current time to ban them. But, I could see a lot of states over time adopting measures that might make it much more difficult to own one. And in my view that would not violate the Second Amendment.
