I think it's likely we can agree that this amendment actually does prohibit the federal government from interfering with people's right to own and carry personal firearms...
Point of order: the language of the Constitution is not in accordance with your interpretation of it. You say "personal" arms, but I see no textual support for such a position - the Constitution makes reference to a "right to keep and bear arms" without qualification, in absolute terms.
However, because you are a sensible person who recognizes that rights in a society consisting of more than one person cannot possibly be absolute, you have chosen to draw a line across what is essentially an absolute right if read literally, as a means of restricting it. But why "personal" arms? I say that the right to keep and bear arms includes land mines and artillery pieces, albeit not nuclear warheads or anthrax, but you don't include artillery and land mines in your reading of the Second like I do. And there's where the argument starts, and where the Constitution fails to guide us, fixed meaning or not - we both agree that rights cannot be absolute, despite the apparent language of the Constitution, and we both agree that a line must be drawn. But what we disagree about is where exactly that line should be drawn.
And that's the crux of the problem with Roy Moore, and the crux of the problem with the Second Amendment, and where the Constitution utterly fails to guide us. This is, I think, by design on the part of the framers, so that we could evaluate for ourselves where that line should be drawn - they knew they couldn't anticipate every future development, and so they left the language such that we could use it as a guide, not as a rigid menu of options.
There's the real underlying problem, in a nutshell - where do we draw the line, whether with guns or with religion? And that's not a Constitutional question, it's a political one. It can't be a matter resolved solely by referring to the Constitution - the Constitution can't tell us whether the Second means only personal arms, or whether it means tanks and airplanes. So we have to fight amongst ourselves about where the line should be drawn. For now, that fight is over, and Roy Moore is on the wrong side of the line. Perhaps someday the line will shift, but for now, he's out of luck.
But why "personal" arms? I say that the right to keep and bear arms includes land mines and artillery pieces, albeit not nuclear warheads or anthrax, but you don't include artillery and land mines in your reading of the Second like I do.
Yes, I do include artillery and land mines in my reading of the 2nd. I narrowed my scope in my statement so as to ensure that we'd have common ground, but since you agree with me as to the broader scope, even better! You see, the purpose of my statement was to locate what we agree on, not what we disagree on.
The nature of my point was as follows. There exists, as we seem to agree, a certain class of weapons that we can say for sure, for a fact, the 2nd amendment definitely prohibits the federal government from denying our possession of. Whether it has protections beyond that, we may have disagreements over, at least for now. But we still agree on something highly significant. Because even the modest position, that it only protects personal firearms, is at war with what the political and media establishment say it says. They say that it only guarantees states the right to organize militias, and that it does not limit federal power to prohibit "assault weapons" and institute other "reasonable restrictions" on personal firearm ownership.
So my point is, we can know "for a fact" that they are wrong - even though they're not "obviously" wrong, in the strict sense of the word, since many people disagree with us. I use this example to illustrate that regular citizens such as ourselves do indeed have the right and duty, and ability, to definitively conclude that the "powers-that-be" can in fact be objectively wrong about the Constitution. It should also be apparent that if we're able to agree on this with relatively minimal effort, with a little more effort we should be able to resolve our disagreements about the other aspects of the amendment, as well as other amendments, to the point where we know for a fact that our understanding is correct.