dairydog: And as Dred Scott seemed to show, older justices did think that American citizenship conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms in public.
No they did not. Unless you mean it in militia formation or drill, since 'bear arms' was in a confrontational manner, and justices, no matter their age, would've been loathe to allow people to show up with bayonet attached & cartridge ready with buck & ball inside a musket. They would've had far less objection to simply carrying unloaded untipped muskets about, as an auxilliary 'right'.
Miller shows an intersection of the "militia" and the "people's right to keep and bear arms," and I think the text shows a rather more complicated interaction instead of the simplistic community right argument you're making.
Pls point out exactly which passages in the 1939 miller decision support what you say above, that the 9 justices were interacting with some individual RKBA. I'd like to see what you're talking about.
Miller is particularly relevant since the court seemed to analyze whether Miller individually possessed a right to own a sawed-off shotgun; if the Second Amendment merely protected "state's rights," shouldn't the court simply have dismissed his argument for lack of standing, instead of going into the details of the weapon in question? Rather, the precedent seems to show an individual right, but one which existed for community purposes, and hence the individual right was limited to the extent that it served the stated community purposes.
This is just reiterating the song & dance which the gun lobby fabricated during the past 30 years, to get around the miller decision. That was a difficult task for the gunlobby/nra - getting around miller - since miller had been interpreted as a militia based RKBA, had been used since 1939 in federal courts to substantiate militia based interpretation (ie april love), and leads just about any unbiased reader to believe their interpretation of 2ndA was militia based.
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