Gun Control & RKBA

... to the the security of a free State, the right of the people..." Until the 1970s, the NRA also interpreted the amendment that way. It is only conservatives on the court who swung the interpretation away from what was originally intended.

"Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”"

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/so-you-think-you-know-the-second-amendment