Essentially parroting retired Chief Justice Warren Burger in his new book.
The author, a professor at NYU (that bastion of conservative thinking) is as wrong as Burger is, but his interpretation of the meaning of "well-regulated militia" fits their common world view: no individual right to gun ownership.
Yet, the individual right to gun ownership isn't something that the NRA concocted (as he contends), it's something that the Constitution confers with that Second Amendment.
It's interesting to me that the author laments the DC vs. Heller ruling from the Supreme Court, noting that the court follows public opinion...I'm not certain that I buy that...but if his point is that public opinion is in favor of gun ownership, then I would accept that...though he may lament this fact of American life.
It's interesting to me as well how the views on "militia" and the right to gun ownership vary with things like income and population density. Poll people in a place like New York, who have never owned or seen a gun, and they're opposed to the right, largely, I suspect because they fear what they don't understand. To them, guns are tools of criminals (even though the police are allowed to have them). To a rural less wealthy Vermonter, however, a gun is a tool for putting meat on the table. Something that they've grown up with, learned to respect, learned to use safely.
As we become more urban, more disconnected from our self-reliant roots, more affluent, we may see the public support for gun ownership decline. It is apparent to me that the majority of urban residents expect the city to provide all of their needs/services, including security and safety. Rural folks tend, again, to rely on themselves for needs.
In the meantime, you'll read inflammatory remarks from those, like FXjohn, who don't support gun rights, but they are logical constructs and fallacies that are built to support an inherently wrong preconception: there is no individual right to gun ownership.
In this country, that right does exist. Not in the minds of a few folks bent on political action, but enumerated in the Constitution, and believed by most of the people.
