What is this statement saying?

[Kingpoleon]

In United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the Second Amendment does not prevent states or individuals from restricting the right to bear arms, so allowing states and individuals to ban people from possessing certain arms.

[Kingpoleon]

Then what is preventing us from "reinterpreting" every single word to mean a completely different thing?

A city actually has the constitutional power to restrict the possession of guns, though not the ownership of them. There is significant evidence that, in the time the Constitution was written, town folk did not keep their guns in their homes, but instead in a centralized arsenal, literally for the purpose of a city militia. So a right to bear arms, if taken not from textualism but from originalism, a philosophy based in context of that specific time, at least cities have the constitutional ability to so centralize weapons for the purpose of a city militia.

It’s unlikely any typical originalist would reach that conclusion, given the usual conservative bias, but it’s an example of the reason why libertarians have historically been a bit hesitant to support originalism. And most other judicial philosophies lack the emphasis on context to reach that conclusion.

[Kingpoleon]

I've actually heard this argument before, but I was under the impression that it only applied to the "bear" portion of the amendment. "Keep" still implies one's ability to have the firearms in one's own house.

That’s a textualist commentary on an originalist idea. 

The central point is that the individual’s ability to bear arms is contingent upon it being for the force of a well regulated militia, such as one with a central armory. This particularly makes sense when we remember the Patriots largely organized around city militia and armories, which the British government sought to reduce to an individual bearing arms.

[Kingpoleon]

The founders deliberately chose wording that unambiguously states that the ownership of arms is not contingent upon militia membership. I find it hard to believe that originalist or textualist arguments could be made otherwise.

It is not contingent upon “militia membership” in the modern sense because that was not practiced at the time. The primary purpose of owning arms, outside of rural settings, is the joint defense of a town. As such, a law that restricts either firearms or ammunition to being held in a general town armory could not be unconstitutional, because such laws were practiced at the time the Constitution was brought into force and afterwards.