A lot of ink has been spilled on Heller, but here's my two cents on why I don't find Stevens' reasoning compelling.

> Point 1: "When I joined the Supreme Court in 1975, both state and federal judges accepted the Court’s unanimous decision in United States v. Miller as having established that the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms was possessed only by members of the militia and applied only to weapons used by the militia."

A lot of precedent that was on the books when Stevens joined the Supreme Court in 1975 was wrong. At that time, the Supreme Court had gutted federalism using the Commerce Clause in Wickard v. Fillburn. 20 years later, Lopez started getting things back on track. It wasn't until the 1990s that New York v. United States and Printz gave teeth to the Tenth Amendment. There is hope yet of undoing some of the damage wrought on contractual freedoms by FDR's unconstitutional threats of court packing.

> Point 2: "Colonial history contains many examples of firearm regulations in urban areas that imposed obstacles to their use for protection of the home."

These regulations aren't actually inconsistent with the Second Amendment being an individual right. Note first that Stevens is engaged in a bit of a motte-and-bailey argument. The general proposition of his argument is that the Second Amendment is an individual right. But he's recycling arguments from Heller, where the dissent took a narrower tack: urban areas present unique challenges that may justify burdening Second Amendment rights. The latter argument is obviously narrower and easier to defend than the more general one. Second, the laws he cites, such as regulations on gun powder storage, can be justified as neutral as to gun rights. Wooden cities at the time were highly flammable and it made sense to regulate gun powder storage for fire reasons. That may be justifiable, even if it has an incidental effect on second amendment rights. But that doesn't mean that, in 1789 Boston, a gun ban--a direct attack on second amendment rights--would've been considered acceptable.

> Point 3: "Until Heller, the invalidity of Second Amendment–based objections to firearms regulations had been uncontroversial."

For that point, he cites 20th-century legislation. That tells us nothing about what the Second Amendment means. Lots of unconstitutional laws were enacted with minor opposition at the time.

> Point 4: "So well settled was the issue that, speaking on the PBS NewsHour in 1991, the retired Chief Justice Warren Burger described the National Rifle Association’s lobbying in support of an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment in these terms: “One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

Again, this just means the Supreme Court believed in its incorrect precedent, until it didn't. It doesn't tell us anything about what the Second Amendment means. What Madison wrote in Federalist #46, however, does: https://www.constitution.org/fed/federa46.htm

> Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.

He criticizes European governments for being "afraid to trust the people with arms." He's clearly talking about armed citizens. He also conceives of those armed citizens organizing at the local level to overthrow the national government. But in his conception, the militia is BYOG (bring-your-own-gun). The right to bear arms doesn't attach to the militia itself. It attaches to "the people," who may then be organized into militias.