Gun control is a hot issue, but it all comes down to the 2nd Amendment, which reads:
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
But what does that sentence actually guarantee?
The 2nd Amendment has very, very limited action, it only "does" one thing . . .
It redundantly forbids the federal government* to exercise powers that were never granted to it.
It never had, nor was it intended to have, nor has it ever been inspected to have, nor has it ever been held to have
any action relating to the organization, training, maintenance or deployment of "militia"by either federal or state governments.
The theories that the 2nd Amendment speaks to militia powers or the right of states to form / control their militia without federal interference is of recent origin in the federal system (1942) and has
never had any presence in the federal judiciary, actually deciding conflicts of federal vs state militia powers.
The people who promote such "militia right" or 'state's right" (or the general 'collective right") theories would force us to accept that the principles of conferred powers and retained rights either never existed or are now defunct (for some unexplained reason they can't articulate in any reasoned legal argument).
They need to ignore / dismiss those fundamental principles of the US Constitution because their
anti-Constitution, leftist political agenda forces them to . . . They need to present the argument that the rights of citizens are dependent upon what the 2nd Amendment says as if it was a permission slip that metes out just the specific degree of gun rights the framers wanted us to have and the conditions under which that "right" can be exercised. Such a statist, authoritarian mindset is the anti-thesis of the rights theory and political principles the founders / framers embraced, believed in and used as the foundation for the Constitution.
So, in your quest to discover what the 2nd Amendment actually says, the first thing to understand is that the individual citizens do not possess the right to keep and bear arms because of what the 2nd Amendment says . . . We possess the right because of what the body of the Constitution
DOESN'T say, as we did not grant the federal government a shred of power to even compose a thought about the personal arms of the private citizen.
The question then (pertaining to the constitutional legitimacy of gun control) isn't what right can be discerned (interpreted) from the words, construction or punctuation of the 2nd Amendment; the question is what powers have been granted to government to have any interest whatsoever in the personal arms of the private citizen.
And the answer to that question is . . . . . NONE!
The 2nd Amendment only serves as a reminder of that fact; redundantly forbidding government to exercise powers never granted to it.
*Originally, the 2nd Amendment only bound the action of the federal government until 2010 when it was "incorporated" under the 14th Amendment and held to bind state action as well.