The late Chief Justice Burger (appointed by Nixon) disagreed:
> That says a well regulated militia being necessary for the defense of the state, people's rights to bear arms. This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word "fraud," on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. Now just look at those words. There are only three lines to that amendment. A well regulated militia -- if the militia, which was going to be the state army, was going to be well regulated, why shouldn't 16 and 17 and 18 or any other age persons be regulated in the use of arms the way an automobile is regulated? It's got to be registered, that you can't just deal with it at will. Someone asked me recently if I was for or against a bill that was pending in Congress calling for five days' waiting period. And I said, yes, I'm very much against it, it should be thirty days' waiting period so they find out why this person needs a handgun or a machine gun.
* MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, Dec. 16, 1991, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eya_k4P-iEo
See also various comments by the late Associate Justice Stevens (Ford).
The individual right to bear arms is a recent invention, with no record of the idea appearing in the legal record until a 1960 article in the William and Mary Law Review:
* https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol2/iss2/6/
And in that article the author himself states:
> The majority of the jurisdictions have concluded that both the United States Constitution and the various state constitutions, having a similar provision relating to the right to bear arms, refer to the militia as a whole composed and regulated by the state as it desires. The individual does not have the right to own or bear individual arms, such being a privilege not a right.
A 2000 review of the literature:
* PDF: http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...