While there is room for reasoned debate among honest, rational people, no amount of legal or historical sophistry can make the NRA's vision for a total lack of gun control in America resemble the "well-regulated militia" mandated by the 2nd Amendment. What they and likeminded extremists in fact support is gun anarchy - the unchecked, unmonitored, and unaccountable profusion of unlimited firepower into the hands of whoever wants it and can afford it. There is, by definition, no regulation involved in such a state, and it obviously does not constitute a "militia" when the very concept of discipline, control, and accountability to central authority over the acquisition, storage, and use of weapons is deemed "tyranny." What the NRA supports, and its Republican Party allies enable, is the opposite of both the letter and intent of the 2nd Amendment, deliberately undermining the "security of a free state" the 2nd Amendment seeks to guarantee and making a "well-regulated militia" effectively impossible.
As shown repeatedly in history - e.g., the Whiskey rebellion that President Washington had to suppress with a show of force - those who claim individual power to veto the policies of an elected state through arms have no intention of service in a compulsory citizen militia where they have to obey orders. In fact, history even into the present day shows that many of these people arm themselves precisely in order to avoid the accountability of a well-regulated militia, and try to deter the state from imposing it on them with criminal threats of violence. These are not citizens protecting their own rights or the security of a free state, but petty tyrants who make no distinction between their power to do something and their right to do it.
Some of these people join voluntary private "militias" with no chain of command to the elected government - i.e., they're just paramilitary gangs serving the commands of whatever rich anti-government nut funds them - and in which they basically play at soldiery so long as it suits them. Unless they would obey the commands of the elected government - which many, if not most of these groups explicitly exist to refuse - they have nothing to do with the "well-regulated militia" stipulated in the Constitution, and certainly nothing to do with enhancing the "security of a free state." Quite the contrary: Many of these groups revel in the rhetoric of tyrants, threatening to impose ideas and practices on others by force that the American public would never consent to in a free state (e.g., reimposing racial segregation, theocracy, silencing those who speak against them, etc.) and make a hobby of issuing death threats to the elected officers of a free state.
But most gun extremists are too undisciplined, disorderly, and irresponsible to even handle that level of organization, and it is these who make up the ideological base of the NRA and its fellow travelers. These are drunken idiots, common thugs, and hate-filled "lone nuts" responsible for so much of the misery and chaos caused by gun anarchy in this country. Such people may float in and out of organizations that reflect their uniquely paranoid, violent, and narcissistic personalities, or they may just take advantage of the weaponry made available to them due to the complete absence of a well-regulated militia: They love guns simply because the ability to murder a lot of people makes them feel powerful - not because of any preexisting political beliefs or cultural dispositions.
You know who I'm talking about: Criminally reckless morons who fire off guns into the air at celebrations, shoot random animals that wander by their house for fun, or use bullets to try to open a beer when there's no bottle opener handy. And in this country, thanks to the NRA, there is no law against carrying a firearm while intoxicated - you could go to jail for operating a motor vehicle drunk because you might kill someone, but it is perfectly legal to carry a semiautomatic assault rifle while being too shitfaced to even recite the alphabet: Something designed to not just kill people, but kill as many people as possible. In what "well-regulated militia" is that permissible? What free state's "security" is served by allowing that?
Anarchy is not freedom, but the tyranny of gangs, lone nuts, and rich tyrants with the money to build their own private armies - and the NRA knows it. The NRA knows the claims they make that gun anarchy improves security are not true: They know that the more unregulated guns there are, and the more firepower they have, the less secure a community is, making people want to buy even more guns just to keep up in the arms race with their neighbors whom they fear. They know this because the gun manufacturing industry that dictates their agenda knows this - the arms industry is most profitable when society is less secure, and kept in a constant state of fear and trauma. This is Mayhem for Money, and it's all that the NRA truly serves. What they didn't count on was that the public would be pushed passed its limit when something like Newtown happened: We would not just shrug and quietly endure more of the same. Their transparent treason is no longer tolerable.
Frankly, the NRA is waging war on the 2nd Amendment, because a "well-regulated militia" doesn't need a lobbying arm, doesn't buy more weaponry than makes sense, and doesn't sell machine guns to gangbangers and drug cartels: I.e., doesn't serve the firearms industry's bottom line to the same extent that gun anarchy does. And the same is true of the "security of a free state" - a free state doesn't need high-powered weaponry everywhere in the hands of unaccountable people, and in fact can't long endure such a state of affairs. The NRA's perverted interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is the 1st and only right the right-wing political element behind the NRA recognizes, and this is what it would read if they were honest about their intentions:
Gun anarchy being necessary to the maximum profits of weapons manufacturers, and the security of a free state being an obstacle to those profits, the right of anyone with money to acquire as much lethal firepower as they please without restriction, obligation, or accountability of any kind shall not be infringed.
Well, it's about time the American people reasserted the supremacy of the US Constitution over the profits of these verminous murderers. Below are just a few features of a well-regulated militia designed to enhance the security of a free state, and to hell with the paranoid narcissists who would call it "tyranny" to have to follow regulations in exchange for their self-appointed power of life and death over others:
1. Rigorous monitoring of the location, ownership, storage, and sales history of every firearm.
2. Criminal penalties for failing to meet the above reporting requirements.
3. Only the legal owner may fire the gun outside of tightly-controlled conditions.
4. Training requirements, including not just gun safety and storage, but gun laws.
5. The greater the firepower, rate of fire, or number of weapons, the more rigorous the reporting, safety, and storage requirements, and the greater the criminal penalties for violating them.
6. Unique labeling of bullets that allows them to be identified after having been fired, and tracked at every point from manufacturing to use.
7. Illegal sale or transfer of a firearm makes you legally accomplice to whatever crimes are committed with it. Losing a firearm or being incautious enough to let it be stolen is reckless endangerment. Failing to report a loss or theft of a firearm is not only reckless endangerment, but obstruction of justice and subject to accomplice charges in whatever crimes follow from the gun's new possessor.
8. No being intoxicated while carrying. Felony penalties.
9. Must report every time the gun is fired: Where, when, under what conditions, how many rounds expended, and identifying each bullet used.
10. All firearm manufacturing must be nonprofit to avoid financially incentivizing the promotion of criminality, chaos, and treason.
And most centrally...
11. Those who enter the citizen militia by virtue of possessing firearms acknowledge the authority of the state to regulate the associated activities. Otherwise there is no "militia," and indeed no "state."
Needless to say, the NRA would be against every single of these, not to mention the multitude of other measures that would be needed to satisfy the Constitution. And the reason, as stated, is that they are simply not interested in a well-regulated militia or the security of a free state. They just want as much money as possible to be transferred from the people into the hands of the arms manufacturers, and they're willing to enable the most hateful, paranoid, criminal, violent domestic enemies of freedom in order to make it happen. Not "gun rights" -
gun anarchy. None of the Founders wanted that, very few Americans want that, and the 2nd Amendment mandates the exact opposite. Time to take back our nation's gun laws from the gangsters, psychos, and terrorists who rule them today.
4:35 PM PT: Just an aside: Apparently Stephen King has written an essay in favor of gun control that looks pretty interesting, from the description in The Guardian.