The key question in looking at the Second Amendment is whether or not the founding fathers were trying to maintain an individual citizens right to possess personal firearms or whether to allow for the State to maintain a militia. When the Second Amendment is taken into context, with the thoughts of those who wrote it, there is no doubt that the intent was to preserve the rights of individual citizens to keep their own firearms.
The Second Amendment reads, " A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The key word in the amendment is "people", throughout the United States Constitution the word people continually refers to individuals, not states. The militia, in colonial times, was considered to be a very able-bodied person who could bear arms. It would be logical to infer that the authors are saying that the free people of the State are the militia and they can keep their personal arms to bear.
If the authors of the Constitution were not addressing individual firearm ownership in the Second Amendment, then there would have been no need for the Second Amendment to begin with. Militia provisions are specifically outlined in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution. In discussing the Bill of Rights, James Madison, the actual author of the Second Amendment, and his contemporaries addressed the right to bear arm in the same breath as the freedoms of speech, press, and religion. They consistently lumped these rights together under such descriptions as "human rights", .
"Private rights", rights "respecting personal liberty", and "essential" and "sacred rights".
Madison is on record as explaining that the Second Amendment was intended to protect people against the confiscation of their own weapons. The views of Madison were widely published before Congress when it enacted the Bill of Rights.
