More ripe, but not enough ripe.
You and I may say that the 2nd Amendment is about the right of the general public to keep military weapons, but that's not what the Supreme Court says. The practical truth is that the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is. The actual holding of the Heller case (the leading Supreme Court 2nd Amendment case) is that Heller could keep a loaded handgun in his home for self-defense. Nothing more can be inferred. On the contrary -- Justice Scalia sprinkled his opinion with plenty of dicta that can be used to support all sorts of gun control.
Scalia explained that one away. According to him, the militia is mentioned in the "prefatory" clause that has no "operative" effect. In other words, a nullity. He seemed to be worried that if we started talking about the meaning of the militia, it would give validity to "insurrectionist" tendencies. (Or else give validity to the minority view on the Court, which was that the militia was the National Guard, and that therefore the RKBA was a right of the government, and not of individuals.)
That all presupposes that Chief Justice Roberts would rule in favor of gun rights. But this is a man who puts the institutional standing of the Court ahead of every other consideration. The man who found a way to uphold Obamacare will find a way to uphold an AWB. He's not going to buck what he thinks is the tide of history. Bottom line: we need at least one more pro-2A justice before risking taking an important case to the Court.
I wouldn’t be so sure, if a certain anti-gun party gets its way the court will be stacked with corresponding anti-gun Judges.
As James Buckley says, Article I, section 8, clause 16 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to organize, arm, and discipline the militia, which clearly indicates a quite different intention for the Second Amendment.
But JFK was a conservative. There used to be such a thing as conservative Democrats. I don't think there's even moderate ones now.
The "2nd Amendment militia" is different from the "Article I militia." In case of a conflict, the 2nd Amendment definition, being a later enactment, would control. If we postulate that the "2nd Amendment militia" is universal (and the writings of the Founding Fathers so indicate), then the "Article I militia" is a subset of that.
As a 15 year old, I worked as a volunteer in JFK's 1960 campaign. To say that JFK was a conservative -- by the standards of the time -- is laughable. In Texas, as in much of the South, there were actually three parties: the liberal Democrats, the conservative Democrats, and the Republicans. LBJ was more or less representative of the conservative Democrats, and that is why he was chosen by JFK, to "balance the ticket." Of course LBJ was the one who later pushed for the Gun Control Act of 1968. The gun issue in those days did not break down along ideological lines.
