The collective right argument held that certain firearms should be the sole purview of the military, such as a state’s national guard – firearms such as the AR 15; banning AR 15s and like rifles and carbines would be Constitutional under the collective right interpretation.
Just the opposite. Going back to the minutemen. The very idea was for the militia to be familiar with the weapons used in war. In fact the minutemen were required to be so equipped with them.
So as a collective right, you could not prohibit those in the militia ie. able bodied men (and by extension women too) from owning them.
Actually not.
Not everyone was qualified to serve in the militia; absent service in a militia one could be prohibited from possessing a ‘weapon of war,’ such as an AR 15.
We see this illustrated in Justice Stevens’ dissent:
“The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia. It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States. Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms. Specifically, there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.”
Heller, ibid
The collective right argument, therefore, perceives the Second Amendment as preserving the states’ authority to maintain a militia, where the states are otherwise at liberty “to regulate private civilian uses of firearms” with impunity, including prohibiting the possession of certain types of firearms altogether – such as banning AR 15s.
Again, in order for Scalia to justify the Second Amendment right as an individual right, he had to eliminate the notion of militia service altogether; with militia service no longer in play, the collective right argument is rejected in favor of the individual right.