Now, let's go to Madison, the father of the Constitution and all that. He firmly opposed a professional (i.e. standing) army when he wrote the constitution. Tool of tyrants, yadda yadda. However, President Madison who exists 30 years in the future, comes out and says "I could never have believed so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I not witnessed the scenes of this day." in response to 2 state militias getting demolished by the British Army.
IDK. They put the 2nd amendment in, and then immediately undermine the philosophical point of governance it's meant to make. Democracy is weird, government is hard, and coming up with 100% accurate statements about the unified sentiments of a group of dozens/hundreds of people from 250 years ago is impossible. I guess that's my point?
That doesn’t follow from this:
“Both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists opposed a standing army and saw it as a tool of oppressors.”
Either you support the 2nd amendment as a means of national defense or your support handing the tools of oppression to the government, per the founding fathers.
>"To disarm the people...[i]s the most effectual way to enslave them." - George Mason, father of the Bill of Rights
>"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty .... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." - Elbridge Gerry, contributor to the Bill of Rights
>"[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist." - Alexander Hamilton
>"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." - Tench Coxe, delegate to the Continental Congress