There’s a little sloppiness in your overviews of the individual SCOTUS cases, and i note that you left out McDonald v Chicago which overruled Cruikshank and incorporated the second amendment, though overall your post was fairly balanced. I do have a couple of points i’d like to make.
The original framework for the amendment was so that state militias could protect from the overreaching federal government, but now has come to represent the right of Americans to protect themselves- from an overreaching government, from other citizens, from foreign nationals who are deemed threat-worthy. That large cultural shift should be enough to question the legitimacy of the amendment in its current form when compared to contemporary standards in thought.
Your argument here follows the premise:conclusion structure which, while logically consistent, relies on a flawed premise. It’s been sometime since I’ve read the Cruikshank decision in its entirety so i may be mistaken in this, but i don’t remember one of its holdings being that the second amendment didn’t pertain to an individual right, rather it held that the right restricted only the federal government and not the states. That’s an important point because it goes to your assertion of what the right was supposed to mean when it was codified in the Bill of Rights. However, regardless of the accuracy of either my recollections or the Cruikshank decision itself, the basis for the Heller decision was an exhaustive review of founding era documents to determine what the amendment was supposed to mean from those who wrote it. The Heller decision was not that the second amendment ‘now’ protected an individual right which was different than what it was originally, but rather that the purpose of the amendment had been self defense all along.
Cruikshank is no longer controlling caselaw. If indeed it held that the second amendment was solely militia related, it was found to have been decided wrongly in Heller. It’s holding that the amendment only applied to the federal government was also overturned in McDonald. Given the holding in Heller, i see no reason the amendment needs to be revisited, and let’s not forget that Heller and a multitude of other founding era sources determined that the second amendment codified a pre-existing right, one that still exists today, and will always exist.
