The other day it occurred to me that ambiguity of the second amendment is most likely deliberate.

If the founders had wanted to establish a clear individual right to gun ownership, they could have drafted the second amendment accordingly, by dropping all reference to the militia.

Had the founders wanted to make it clear that the only right present was a right to be armed as needed for militia service, that could easily have been done as well.

Instead the US ended up with the ambiguous mess that we have. This was not incompetence. I think it was deliberate. In particular, the founders would not have accepted a clear individual right to gun ownership because it could be regarded as applying to slaves. Ambiguous militia blather was put in there as reassurance against that possible interpretation, since slaves would most certainly not be in the militia, and free blacks could be (and were) excluded as well.

This is all speculation, of course, but it is interesting to note that all variants of the second amendment that were considered during the drafting of the bill of rights have this 2-part structure: militia blather + a operative clause giving “the people” the right to keep and bear arms.