Exactly! And it is for precisely this reason that we should not project 21st Century political views onto deceased historical figures based on something they said or did 200 years ago: "times were different then," and to pretend as if we know where the Founders would stand on gun control, or immigration, or gay marriage had they lived to see the present day is intellectually unsound.
An interpreter of a provision in the U.S. Constitution always needs a major premise to work with in order to arrive at a conclusion. The major premise should be what the provision was intended to mean. What would "the right to keep and bear arms" have meant to our Founding Fathers. If a modern interpreter does not know what major premise to infer from the 2nd Amendment, then the 2nd Amendment is meaningless. The modern interpreter does not have to know specific things about muskets, etc. Does the first phrase in the 2nd Amendment alter the major premise in any way? The answers to these questions are not easy and I'm not going to pretend to have any answers, but I feel I've to say that the Founding Fathers' intentions do matter when we are interpreting a provision in the U.S. Constitution -- the main body of the document -- and any of the first ten amendments. Their intentions matter as we try to identify what are called major premises.
