An aside, but it’s a bit funny to focus on the plain-text reading of “shall not be infringed” and not “a well-regulated militia.”
Anyway, I'm not sure I have a disagreement with your original point. It just seemed a bit funny to use the second amendment as an example of a thing that (supposedly) has unambiguous meaning, but gets interpreted politically by the courts. I'd argue that the ambiguity of that amendment is one of the most notorious things about it!
Probably the main effect is to grant women and the more elderly the right to bear arms as well.
===== re: below due to throttling =======
>Congress defines… historical precedent… but we were talking about a plain-text reading of the Constitution.
That makes it easy then.
The plain text ascribes the right to the people not the militia so it's moot whether they're in the militia or not in such case to have the right to keep and bear arms.
The answer is easy in the plain-text case, whether you are associated with the militia is moot, as the plain text unambiguously says the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
It's only in the non plaintext case can you start handwaving that right is restricted to militia yada yada.
> Until the late 20th century, there was little scholarly commentary of the Second Amendment. In the latter half of the 20th century, there was considerable debate over whether the Second Amendment protected an individual right or a collective right. The debate centered on whether the prefatory clause ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State") declared the amendment's only purpose or merely announced a purpose to introduce the operative clause ("the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"). Scholars advanced three competing theoretical models for how the prefatory clause should be interpreted...
You can point out certain collective broad groups like blacks didn't get a collective nor individual legal access to arms, but given how racist the courts and "scholarly" academic institutions were at that time it's no surprise they spent little time covering it and found little representation in the legal system and little scholarly commentary.
It was after the passage of the NFA and the GCA, the main gun control acts of the US, which happened in the mid 20th century, where suddenly all these militia fuck fuck games started to enter the chat (at one point, SCOTUS claiming short-barrel shotguns taxed by the NFA not being protected because the military didn't use them -- they were wrong but the defendant was a dead guy with no representation so it was a poisoned appeal case to set precedent and no one was there to show the light infantry at the time were actively using them).