Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah Heller is the outlier here. Here's the Wikipedia page for its precedent, Miller : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller
Wow, that one sounds nuts: "In reality, the district court judge was in favor of the gun control law and ruled the law unconstitutional because he knew that Miller, who was a known bank robber and had just testified against the rest of his gang in court, would have to go into hiding as soon as he was released. He knew that Miller would not pay a lawyer to argue the case at the Supreme Court and would simply disappear…
Myself, I think 2A is just an anachronism. Militias as they were at the founding don't exist anymore. Almost no one in modern US society meets military readiness standards. Armed forces use bonkers weapons of war the founders could never have imagined. Even individual person-on-the-street weapons are pretty boggling by 18th century standards. And this is just considering firearms, expanding "arms" to whatever the US military considers to be a weapon (software/hardware exploits, biological weapons, chemical weapons).
Further, I think "2A as a check on government" is meritless because Congress regulates militias, and the Constitution (Article I, §8) reads: "The Congress shall have power to... provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." Allowing governments to suppress insurrections is the opposite of allowing checks on government.
I'm not like, super into gun control--I think the US is too big for a one-size-fits-all policy and I think a lot of implementations just land men of color in prison w/ felonies. But none of the pro-gun 2A interpretations make sense to me, and from where I sit the debate is more a reflection of Congress' ongoing slide into irrelevance and sclerosis as other less encumbered institutions in the US do the actual legislating.