You know, I've heard a lot of nonsense about the Standard Model. I think people like to toss that term around like it makes them seem like they know what they're talking about. Trouble with the standard model is it's only been "standard" for the past twenty years or so, and even then only in a small circle of gun rights advocates.
The Standard Model is bad history. It was a theory crafted to justify a pro-gun interpretation of the second amendment, and to dispense with that pesky militia clause that stands in the way of what gun rights advocates think the second amendment should say.
Sure, it sounds great, but the fact is the original intent of the second amendment was only to protect a right tied to militia service. The phrase "keep and bear arms" was an eighteenth century legal term of art that applies only to militia service. The founders never imagined an individual right to keep and bear arms the way we think of it today. As the eminent Judge Richard Posner points out, what if the state wanted to enact a law requiring all arms to be stored in a central facility to make the militia more efficient?
Funny how the standard model is only supported by some legal scholars and not any historians, huh? The fact is that the militia clause cannot be accounted for by the Standard Model, and it is still an embarrassment to proponents of the standard model who are aware of history. The Founders didn't just put it there as window dressing, it was meant to inform the Second Amendment. Thankfully, I'm not an originalist, so I don't particularly care what the founders thought. I thank God that activist justices like Scalia came along and rewrote the Constitution to give us a fundamental right to keep and bear arms. But if you take an honest look at history without trying to promote a pro-gun agenda, then it is obvious that the individual right to keep and bear arms (separate from militia service) simply wasn't there to begin with.
That's why it saddens me to see Scalia and other "standard model" advocates stoop to such blatant hypocrisy, fashioning a shoddy false history just to claim their views line up with "original intent." A much simpler solution is to abandon the quixotic hope of ascertaining original intent (while in reality creating a parody of original intent to justify preconceived notions). Just let the preconceived notions come first and interpret the constitution in light of modern sensibilities. Any thinking originalist cannot support a fundamental right to keep and bear arms. But that doesn't mean a fundamental right to keep and bear doesn't exist! Scalia just created one! So why not treat the constitution like the living document it is?