Advancing policy initiatives, which contravene the plain meaning of the individual right to bear arms, requires a constitutional amendment. The advocates of a complete ban on firearms would have to effect an amendment to the Constitution rather than conveniently reading the Second Amendment to suit such an objective. The individual rights approach finds acceptance among most legal scholars. Few legal scholars support the collective rights approach. As of 1996, in total, only seven articles supported the collective rights view of the Second Amendment.
Some scholars describe the opening words of the Second Amendment as the justification clause.
But it does so not through directly protecting a right on the part of the federal government, to arm the populace as they see fit. Rather, the amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority for the states to organize their own militias. Professor Tribe has not always espoused this view. And in modern circumstances, those words most plausibly may be read to preserve a power of the state militias against abolition by the federal government, not the asserted right of individuals to possess all manner of federal weapons. Such foundation for legal argument is at best questionable.