Second, JPS appears to believe that conditions for the founding generation were roughly equivalent to conditions now, and that many of the framers did not literally have the frontier outside their back doors, or that the framers were not revolutionaries whose individual possession of weapons made the Constitution possible in the first place.
Since Stevens is suddenly interested in these things, here's the opinion of one of them concerning the Supreme Court:
"But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."
—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804.
As true in 1804 as in 2008. That at least has not changed.