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"If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security." - Alexander Hamilton
"For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security." - Thomas Jefferson
"We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. We can never be safe till this is done." - Thomas Jefferson
Obviously there are many quotes from our Founding Fathers on gun ownership (so there is no need for you to post others, I'll concede there will be quotes which cover many angles on the issue), but it's clear from the comments of these two, at the very least, there were people who believed in a well-regulated militia for the defense of our country.
Not one of those mentions the right to keep and bear arms, much less ties it only to use in the militia. The two are entirely distinct concepts.
Federal Cases Regarding the Second Amendment
From this, we can see the 2nd Amendment was NOT interpreted as an unabridged right to own any and all firearms a citizen wanted, it merely regulated the federal government.
The only thing the Court in Cruikshank said was that the 2A only applied to the federal government, as did every other article of the Bill of Rights before it specifically incorporated against the states. This is no more useful than saying the 1A mentions only what Congress may not do -- not states, not municipalities, only Congress. The rights to free speech, free press, and free exercise of religion are no more collectivized in the state than is the 2A.
And to that end, the Court is saying that even though the right to keep and bear arms is protected against federal infringement, citizens can look to other sources for its protection when the state is the encroacher.
Yours, of course, is a frequent dishonest reading of Cruikshank, but as you are hardly the first one to do so, I will not attribute that fault to you. You will not, however, find any such interpretation of Cruikshank prior to 1940. You will find it all over the Warin-based Circuit Courts Circle Jerk, however, which has happily been corrected by the Supreme Court.
When we combine this with the previous statements
The previous statements had nothing to do with the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and thus any "combining" is erroneous at best and simply dishonest at worst.
we can make the argument the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to prevent the federal government from limiting state governments to form their own militias.
And it's a silly, erroneous, and dishonest argument. But sure, you can make it.
The idea the 2nd Amendment only limited the federal government (and did not mean universal rights to a gun) was furthered in Presser v. Illinois
The problem is that the bolded part is completely fabricated. The court didn't say this. The court didn't NEED to say this to decide the case in front of it. This is pulled out of thin air.
Presser involved ONLY the claim that men may join together, publicly, in paramilitary groups on their own volition and that the state couldn't interfere with it. That had nothing to do with the individual right to arms and most certainly did not establish that the right to arms exists only for the purpose of participation in a state militia. At most, it said the 2A doesn't keep a state from reserving to itself the only authority to create a militia, not that the right to arms is dependent on it.
You are claiming things which simply aren't there.
So we've now established the belief in the existence of a trained and well-regulated militia for the defense of our country, and we have Supreme Court cases which show the intent of the 2nd Amendment (at the time of the rulings) was not about granting unabridged rights to own a gun, but rather to protect the concept of a militia from being undermined by the federal government.
Which would make my original statement "a private citizen being able to own a gun for the purpose of assembling in a state militia for defense against foreign enemies" a rather valid interpretation, one which is supported by direct quotes from Founding Fathers and rulings in Supreme Court cases, and my claim of being supported by thousands of people (which can be found with a simple Google search, I'm sure) and hundreds of years much stronger.
Except, as I've point out, it's all bull****.