Amendment 2

So Mr. Trump has been in office for 100 days as of tomorrow.  In (um, I guess?) celebration of this, he spoke to the National Rifle Association today.  He stated that his presidency is bringing about the end of an "eight-year assault" on Second Amendment gun ownership rights.  I find this troubling. What exactly are the rights conferred by the Second Amendment, and why were they deemed so important?
Let's start with the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which is at the heart of the endless debate around owning guns.  Amendment 2, The Right to Bear Arms, reads, "A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."  The question is....what exactly does this statement mean? 

 We'll start with "Militia" (note the capitalization, which implies the importance of the word).  What is a militia?  Originally, militias were organizations by individual states that were designed to protect each state against threats and/or a tyrannical national government.  We don't really have these organizations anymore.  We do have modern, somewhat similar versions:  The National Guard (not to be confused with the National Guard of the United States, which is a different, federal-level organization) is established and controlled by each US state (and 4 territories), and is called upon by the states' governors to respond to disasters like floods and hurricanes.  When you read the above Amendment, militias seem to be the purpose of citizens being armed.  I'm not sure that our modern militias exist to protect the "freedom" of the state though, that doesn't seem to be in their job description.  I'm not even sure what a "free" state refers to...is Oregon more or less free than Kansas? Or Colorado?  Or New Hampshire (after all, their motto is "Live free or die"!) How do you measure that?  And what about the words "well-regulated"?  Regulated around what, and by whom?  Does this mean that their ownership and/or use of arms is regulated?  And finally, what exactly is meant by the word "arms"?  Does that refer to knives, muskets, cannons?  I'm pretty sure that it didn't refer to AK-47 assault rifles, or nuclear missiles, because those didn't exist at the time Amendment 2 was written.

My point is this:  the wording of this Amendment is very unclear, and it was written at a time when the concern of an oppressive federal government attacking its citizens was on the minds of the authors of the Bill of Rights.  The USA of today has very different concerns.  We need to take care in our translation of Amendment 2, and remember that the Bill of Rights was written to protect individuals and states, and make sure that our legislation concerning guns is fulfilling that purpose.