Why can't it be expanded? Clarified?
Because it's as expansive and clear as possible. "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
How can one "expand" that more? "Arms" encompasses all weapons, from rocks to battleships. "The people" encompasses all citizens. "Shall not be infringed" forbids limitations.
How can it be clarified any more? People might have to pick up an old dictionary to understand "well-regulated" as written; that's not hard. "Militia"? pretty clear that "the people" form the "militia".
The problem isn't that it's hard to understand. The problem is that people don't want to understand it.
The Constitution is a great work, and works fairly well.
Ain't broke; don't fix it.
However, the world has changed a very great deal in the last 210 years. The nature of "arms," have changed dramatically, and therefore so have their role in defending citizens from excesses of government.
I totally disagree.
The world has not changed much. We may be able to move goods, people and information from here to there faster, but people still behave essentially the same. Hoodlums still mug people on dark streets, and armies still invade other countries. The modern effects are equivalent to ancient effects of such violence.
As one who studies swords as well as guns, I've concluded there is little advantage of a gun over a sword when both sides use essentially the same weapons.
As for defending people from excesses of government, nothing has changed there either. Tyrants were just as effective at oppressing people with swords and torches back then as they are today with guns and grenades. Being armed with rifles let the Branch Dividians hold off a modern army - complete with tanks and helicopters - for 50+ days. Afghanistan drove out a superpower's military by using mostly just small arms.
The tools have changed; the needs and results have not.
So, why not add a 28th amendment, expanding on the second?
What's to expand? It's not that the 2nd is unclear, it's that they refuse to accept its meaning.
If the people cannot decide on a meaning for such an important bit of legislation, does it retain any meaning at all?
When someone decides that "the people" means "the state" in the 2nd Amendment, but means "the people" in other amendments, it's not that the meaning is undecided but that certain readers are desparately trying to make it say something other than what it plainly says. If someone is voluntarily stupid, you can't make him smart.
The Second Amendment does allow the citizenry to bear arms. But due to its wording, squeamish judiciaries have managed to get around this all important Amendment.
No, squeamis judiciaries have managed to plainly ignore the obvious. Thanks to a huge pile of precidents, creative liars can find some twisted way to justify a misinterpretation. It's like the linguistic exercise of taking a word, finding chains of synonyms, and eventually coming up with the antonym of the first word.
Why not stop them in their tracks?
How? They are willfully irrational. Anything we say gets twisted.
The Founding Fathers were truly great men, of this there can be no dispute. They were probably the preeminent men of their day, in fact. But, there can also be no dispute that these were men. They were not Gods, and infallible. They obviously did not mean for the Constitution to be an unchanging island of rigidity, with the rest of soceity morphing around it.
Yes, they provided ways to modify the Constitution: very difficult ways, but ways nontheless.
Why not make use of the system that they gave us, amending their creation, to truly secure to ourselves the rights that it protects?
Because given the chance to change the 2nd Amendment, the majority would lessen it into oblivion. How could it possibly be improved...and how could you possibly expect an "improvement" to pass? Instead of merely updating the definitions and grammar, we would end up with something like "Civilians have the right to own government-approved firearms for sporting purposes. Such firearms shall not include semi-automatics, ugly guns, handguns, assault weapons, sniper rifles, or any gun with (a) ability to hold more than one bullet, (b) greater than .22 caliber, and (c) muzzle velocity greater than 1000 fps. In other words, all you get is a muzzle-loading .22, and that must be registered with all appropriate governmental bodies. By the way, you can only have 10 bullets at any given time." See? That would give you the right to keep and bear arms...just in a way suitable for this "changed world".
The 2nd Amendment is completely clear and fine as is. Most who claim to find confusion and complexity do not want to clarify it, they want to change or eliminate it.