At the risk of sounding particularly dense, what part of the whole 'right to bear arms' bit specifically denotes firearms?

Oh, sure - I'm not saying it doesn't cover them, but considering the sort of weaponry still commonly in use in 1791, I can't help but wonder if it also meant things like a cudgel, sword, hatchet, etc. - i.e., the kinds of hand weapons that'd be commonly available and perfect for the possibility of forming a scratch militia from the citizenry (for example, an axe used as a tool in civilian life = an instant militia weapon).

As I say, I might easily be missing something which deals with that (partly because I'm a Brit who's not totally au fait with all the minutiae of the US constitution, and partly because I'm prone to moments of bone-headedness), in which case mea culpa.

But I felt it worth a mention, because it's another thing that goes relatively un-covered by the media - for all the talk by the pro-gun nutters about 'protecting the constitution' and whatnot, there's very little mention of the time and circumstances they it was written in, and whether or not such things are still valid when applied to the very different state of the US today (my short answer: no - so update the damn thing...).

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It's important to remember, as I have noted many times before, that keeping guns "in case the government decides to go on a rampage" is NOT a protected right under the Second Amendment.

• A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The Founding Fathers were no dummies. They were not precognitive seers, as some would have them, but they understood their own times very well, and they also understood that the idea of violent revolution, once planted in the minds of the people, would be difficult to dislodge. Thus, they framed the Second Amendment very specifically: the "right to bear arms" exists only in the context of protecting the the state, and as such only in the form of a "well regulated militia", the government being the source of "regulations".

Simply put, the way the Second Amendment is (carefully) phrased, the moment an individual claims his "arms" are for protection against the government, that individual has abdicated all rights under the Second Amendment.

To invoke an old joke, you can't murder your parents and then call upon the mercy of the court on the grounds that you are an orphan.

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Isn't anything that REDUCES the body count preferable to something that INCREASES the body count?

If we look closely at the phrasing of the Amendment, it seems to me quite clearly created with the idea that this would not always be the case. The reference to a well regulated militia "being necessary" sets the Amendment very much in its time and place. As the years went by, and the tiny new Nation grew larger and stronger, it became less and less dependent upon an armed civilian populace to protect it. In fact, as I have noted many times before, if, today, we were to really find ourselves in a situation where the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines had been obliterated, and the last line of defense was a bunch of weekend warriors in state "militias", we could consider that war well and truly lost.