Petitioners claim that the Second Amendment is derived from the seventeenth of certain amendments proposed by Virginia, and that Virginia [s]eparately . . . proposed amending the Militia Clauses directly: 11thThat each state respectively shall have the power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining its own militia, whensoever Congress shall omit or neglect to provide for the same. Pet. Br. 26 (citation omitted). Yet both proposals originated in the same document, the Second Amendments precursor among provisions constituting the bill of rights, and the militia amendment among what the convention labeled [t]he other amendments. David Young, THE ORIGIN OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT 462 (2d ed. 2001).If guaranteeing the peoples right to keep and bear arms, with reference to a well regulated militia and a free state, were intended to secure the states a right to arm their militias, the Virginia Convention would not have separately proposed an explicit reservation of the states militia powers. That the Second Amendments direct precursor came to Congress in a bill of rights, alongside a state militia power among other amendments, strongly suggests the two are not identical.
Indeed, if rejected language is any clue as to the meaning of that which was accepted, perhaps the most telling example was the Framers rejection of the following proposed amendment: That each State respectively shall have the power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining its own militia, whensoever Congress shall omit or neglect to provide for the same. . . . FIRST SENATE JOURNAL 126.
This proposal stated, in unmistakably direct and concise fashion, exactly that meaning which Petitioners would divine in the Second Amendment through tortured linguistics, fanciful explanations, and hidden history. And it was rejected by the Framers. [H]istory does not warrant concluding that it necessarily follows from the pairing of the concepts that a person has a right to bear arms solely in his function as a member of the militia. Robert Sprecher, The Lost Amendment, 51 AM. BAR ASSN J. 554, 557 (1965)
Seems to me it was a matter of convenience rather than some clue "as to the real meaning".