Conservative estimates of defense gun uses are on the order of hundreds of thousands per year, while unlawful homicides in the mere thousands, and most of these are gang-related. That's solid evidence the Second Amendment is working as intended - to guarantee the natural right to self-preservation for each individual. It has nothing to do with any organized militia now.
Yes, which is the opposite of your claim that an armed population prevents mass shootings.
An armed population enables mass shootings, which is why, in total, per capita, and heck, probably even per gun, the US has the most mass shootings outside of actual organized armed conflicts anywhere in the world.
Perhaps, but “better control of guns = less shootings” I'd an emninently well-demonstrated pragmatic consideration.
> an existing super-empowering technology can be used by individuals to decentralize and evenly distribute political power
The US has very nearly the least evenly distribution of political power as well as the easiest access to firearms in the developed West, so whatever the US actually has, ideological fantasies aside, isn't a pragmatic solution to that question, either.
> We are safer and more reliable when the State does not have a monopoly on force.
The State is by definition whatever entity or combination thereof possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
No, it's not.
Evidence: the parts of the world with no parallel to the Second Amendment, where mass shootings are far rarer than in the US; in the US, they are nearly a daily occurrence, depending on the precise threshold you set.
The safety, such as it was, provided by the Second Amendment was the disincentive the availability of a militia drawn from the armed populace placed on the reliance on large professional armed police and military forces, which reliance was the threat it was designed as a bulwark against. This completely fell apart a little bit into the 20th Century.