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With no Second Amendment, Congress could pass a law, as limited as this: banning assault rifles or as sweeping as prohibiting all private firearm ownership and requiring the surrender of all privately held firearms.

Right. Perhaps I missed something, but we do have a Second Amendment and should be no less willing for it to disappear or to be disregarded than any of the others.

So what's the point?

>>Right. Perhaps I missed something, but we do have a Second Amendment and should be no less willing for it to disappear or to be disregarded than any of the others<<

Remember when we had a 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th and 10th Amendment?

If they can erase those, the 2nd is the only thing holding the others up. So it is the natural next target.

Uh, the first three amendments are special. They recognize the right of the common man to take upon himself the traditional privileges of the nobility.

They are, third, the privilege of conducting one's household business without fear or threat of the king's military coercion.

Second, the privilege of suing others in the king's courts when resolution of a private dispute is otherwise not possible (this is where we ask the king to provide his military muscle to our disputes ~ one of the corollaries of the 'right to keep and bear arms'). And

First ~ free speech, free thought, freepress, free assembly, freedom to ask redress, freedom to petition, freedom to work with others for one's own benefit, etc. Even the nobility in Europe did not have such privileges which is probably why they are enumerated separately from those in the Second Amendment.

Regarding your right to file suit against someone else in an otherwise personal dispute, the Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 provisions relate strictly to a requirement imposed on the federal courts ~ that there must first be a real dispute so hypotheticals are out of bounds. That raises the question of just what part of the Constitution lets mere human beings to go to federal court and sue someone ~ and there it is, the Second Amendment does so by clearly granting every person in the country the traditional privileges of European nobility ~ all embodied in the first dicta ~ to keep and bear arms! The rest necessarily follows.