If it was "clear" why did you need a grammar expert to decipher it?
"Which of the original states used the term "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" with the intention of permitting the state to disarm 85-year-old women?"
You seem to have this theory that if something isn't protected it is forbidden. Is that what you think? Do you think that if a constitution doesn't protect the RKBA of an 85-year-old woman, she is prohibited from owning arms?
You are a strange ranger.
"Certainly there must be at least one which clearly used that term to protect only militia service."
In reviewing the 1776 Constitutions of the several colonies, very few mention arms at all. Virginia's said:
"That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free State"
Is that what you were looking for?
The statement of rights in the Bill of Rights is categorical, and contains no exceptions other than the use of the word "reasonable" in the Fourth Amendment.
This unequivocal form suggests that the rights do not vary to suit the circumstance and are not subject to exceptions.
Our rights are, in fact, absolute:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and so forth.
Are our rights absolute, or are they in fact subject to "reasonable" regulation in the interest of public safety or for other good purpose?
Let's take as an example what is possibly the most bedrock "common sense" gun control restriction on the books: the prohibition against the ownership or possession of firearms by convicted felons.
By "convicted felons" we mean those who have been convicted of a felony, but are no longer serving time or on probation, and have been released back into society.
There seems to be no comprehensive historical or legal investigation of this exception. The restriction seems not to have existed at the time the right to keep and bear arms was memorialized in the 1689 English or 1789 American Bill of Rights.
The great commentator on the English common law, Sir William Blackstone, makes no reference to such an exception.
I asked Joyce Lee Malcolm, author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, whether she was aware of such a prohibition during the 17th and 18th centuries. She said that she was not, but that it would have been something of a non-issue, because most felonies in those days were crimes punished by death.
Clayton Cramer's excellent history of the treatment by the courts of the right to keep and bear arms, For The Defense Of Themselves And The State, contains intermittent discussions of the exception. The first American court cases to discuss the exception appear in the early 1900s, suggesting that the state statutes creating the exception were also enacted at about that time.
Early and modern state court cases upholding the exception did so on the ground that the Second Amendment does not apply to state legislation, and does not prevent the enactment of gun control restrictions for the public welfare. The exception was enacted into federal law in the Gun Control Act of 1968.
Later state court cases uphold the statutes outlawing possession or ownership by felons against challenges under state constitutions. In this regard, the experience of New Hampshire is instructive. (What follows is recounted from Clayton Cramer's book.)
In 1978, a proposed constitutional amendment recognizing the right to keep and bear arms was put to the voters. The proposed amendment, however, contained clauses permitting the state to regulate the manner of carrying weapons and excluding felons. The amendment failed to pass.
In 1981, the amendment was again put to a vote of the people, this time without the two clauses, and it passed.
In 1990, however, the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the statute prohibiting possession of a firearm by felons under the New Hampshire right to keep and bear arms. Please note the degree of respect afforded to the question of the rights of persons expressed in the heart of the court's argument in support of its decision:
"As the defendant concedes, the State constitutional right to bear arms is not absolute and may be subject to restriction and regulation. Assuming that the right to bear arms is no more absolute than the right of free speech... a restriction... may be sustained if it 'narrowly serve[s] a significant government interest...' The government interest served by the statute, protection of human life and property, is patently significant."
Thus, the court upheld a man's conviction on the basis of a concession by the defendant, implicitly agreed to by the court, without citation to any authority by the defendant and an assumption!
Implicit in the court's statement is the assumption that the felon exception serves "the protection of human life and property."
Here is the belief that ex-felons, as a class without distinction or degree, despite the fact that numerous felonies are not violent crimes against persons, will with a regularity sufficient to justify legislative action and an incursion upon the right to bear arms, commit crimes with guns.
Such is the precedent, such is the intellectual rigor and concern, that establishes a permanent exception to a right.
Consider, in this light, the notion that the courts are the guardians of your rights.
Can an ex-felon be denied his right to free speech or free press? Can he be denied the right to assemble, or the free exercise of his religion? May convicted felons be subject to unreasonable and warrantless searches and seizures? May they, upon arrest for a subsequent crime, be denied due process of law, the right to trial by jury and, when convicted, may they be subject to cruel and unusual punishment?
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Our Constitution says no, an ex-felon does not lose all those obviously inalienable rights. - Isn't it amazing that only the right to own and carry arms is lost because of a felony DUI?
Because you refuse to believe me or the Founders. The structure used in the Second Amendment is used frequently in Latin. It is the structure used to communicate the least connection between the dependent and independent clauses. The typical American today is unable to make that distinction. But you don't want to be among them, do you?
So this means that an 85-year-old woman does not have a protected right to keep and bear arms in Virginia? Would that be your claim? Is that how the Virginia courts interpret this?
Tell me again why it is not the right of the well-regulated militia to keep and bear arms that is protected? What is accomplished by protecting "the right of the people" rather than "the right of a well-regulated militia"?