The founders were obviously concerned with the need for a military to "maintain a free state", but I'd doubt that a centralized military would have been palatable at the time.
There was a mistrust of the Federal government at the time, and it was believed that state militias could act as a check against a Federal standing army which goes rogue.
We have bigger issues than gun control at a federal level.
There is plenty of 2nd Amd. scholarship that goes over all of this. Not saying you need to agree with the scholarship, but a lot of people have thought about his stuff and researched it deeply.
Gotchas statements re: "...well regulated...", cars are registered why not guns, restrict people to owning muskets, etc., are unhelpful.
In the view of the theory underlying the second amendment, it is an existential threat to the latter which makes assuring that the State can meet it's internal and external security needs solely through small permanent cadres plus mobilization of the citizen militia of paramount importance.
> Standing armies were the part of the motivation for the 2nd Amd.
Preventing standing armies was, which is presumably why the statement was that having one (and also standing paramilitary forces for internal security, which was actually the abuse that was the biggest fear motivating fear of standing armies) rendered the second amendment irrelevant.
This is inaccurate?
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Federalist_(Dawson)/45
James Madison argues from the assumption of having an standing army, and why an armed populace makes a Federal tyranny unlikely.
There are many (most) things I don’t like about Republicans, but making THIS an issue is something I just don’t understand about Democrats.
Pick your battles.