Doesn’t the Second Amendment’s reference to “well-regulated” imply controls on militia weapons?
As the D.C. Circuit explained in Parker, “well-regulated” means “properly supplied with arms and subject to organization by the states.” In its eighteenth-century American context, “well-regulated” signified that the militia would be equipped with citizen-furnished weapons so that it could serve as a counterweight to a standing army. The framers feared and distrusted standing armies, and realized, in granting Congress near-plenary power over the militia, that a select, armed subset of “organized militia” – such as today’s National Guard – might be equivalent to a standing army. So they wisely crafted the Second Amendment to forbid Congress from disarming ordinary citizens, thereby ensuring the existence of a “well-regulated” militia, one component of which would be manned by Americans bearing their own arms.
