Subject: Re: The true meaning of the "right to bear arms&q
So if "keep and bear arms" had both a common usage meaning and a 'term of art' meaning back in the day, you would use the common usage meaning to construe the 2A, unless there was a very good basis for not doing so.

James Madison wrote the amendments, right? I don't suppose James Madison himself had tried to clarify the meaning of the 2A. I guess not, or the debate might well be long over.

There's apparently been more research done on the meaning of "bear arms" "back in the day". It's a field called corpus linguistics. The "new" evidence suggests that "bear arms" was much more commonly applied in the context of a militia than not! I thought this was a good 8 minute discussion of that - https://youtu.be/AT2jMJk1akA