The 2nd Amendment Is An Individual Right

The Second Amendment addressed Whig fears of a professional standing army by guaranteeing the right of citizens to arm themselves and join militias. Over the years, the militia preface has become thoroughly (and often, deliberately) misinterpreted to imply that the framers intended citizens to be armed only in the context of an army under the authority of the state. In fact, militias were the exact opposite of a state-controlled army: the state militias taken together were expected to serve as a counterweight to the federal army, and the further implication was that citizens were to be as well armed as the government itself. (Supreme Court decisions in the early twenty-first century reaffirmed the individual right to possess firearms.)

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, pg. 134.