First, as William Van Alstyne (law professor at Duke) points out, the "right of the people" described in the Second Amendment is "to keep and bear arms," not to belong to a militia.
Rather, the Second Amendment adheres to the guarantee of the right of the people to keep and bear arms as the predicate for the other provision to which it speaks, i.e., the provision respecting a militia, as distinct from a standing army separately subject to congressional ...control.... In relating these propositions within one amendment, moreover, it does not disparage, much less does it subordinate, "the right of the people to keep (pg.473) and bear arms." To the contrary, it expressly embraces that right and indeed it erects the very scaffolding of a free state upon that guarantee. It derives its definition of a well-regulated militia in just this way for a "free State": The militia to be well-regulated is a militia to be drawn from just such people (i.e., people with a right to keep and bear arms) rather than from some other source (i.e., from people without rights to keep and bear arms).
In other words, the right to keep and bear arms is not subordinate to the purpose of having a militia—the notion of a "well regulated militia" is subordinate to the purpose of having an armed citizenry. Furthermore, Van Alstyne points out, the reference in the Second Amendment's opening clause is "an express reference to the security of a 'free state.' It is not a reference to the security of THE STATE." Thus, the purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure an armed citizenry, from which can be drawn the kind of militia that is necessary to the survival of a free state.
Thus, under the Standard Model's interpretation, the language "well regulated militia" is not a limitation on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, but an outgrowth of that right. As Don Kates describes matters, "[t]hus, the amendment's wording, so opaque to us, made perfect sense to the Framers: believing that a militia (composed of the entire people possessed of their individually owned arms) was necessary for the protection of a free state, they guaranteed the people's rights to possess those arms." Kates concludes this passage by stating that "[a]t the very least, the Framers' understanding of 'militia' casts doubt on an interpretation that would guarantee only the state's right to arm organized military units."
