Does a statute of "longstanding vintage" have any effect on the meaning of the Second Amendment?

This problem arises frequently in textual interpretation cases involving "statutes of long-standing vintage." United States v. Kimsey, 668 F.3d 691, 699-701 (9th Cir. 2012). To be sure, it is not impossible to navigate this difficulty and avoid erring in some such cases, see, e.g., id. But the older a text is, the more distant we become from the interpretive community alive at the time of the text's adoption, and the less able we are to approach a text through the perspective of such people. Easterbrook, supra, at xxv. There comes a point where the original meaning of the text "is no longer recoverable reliably," as it has simply been lost to the passage of time. Id. When problems of this kind surface in Second Amendment cases involving the constitutionality of discrete firearm regulations, the text of the Second Amendment is unlikely to offer a dependable solution.