17/08/29 15:04:30.82 K5ac0Y5O0.net
[Wikipedia]
Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
URLﾘﾝｸ(en.wikipedia.org)
Militia in the decades following ratification
During the first two decades following the ratification of the Second Amendment, public opposition to standing armies,
among Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike, persisted and manifested itself locally as a general reluctance to create a professional armed police force,
instead relying on county sheriffs, constables and night watchmen to enforce local ordinances.
It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace,
both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people.
A standing army is peculiarly obnoxious in any free government, and the jealousy of such an army has at times been so strongly demonstrated in England
as to lead to the belief that even though recruited from among themselves, it was more dreaded by the people as an instrument of oppression than a tyrannical monarch or any foreign power.
So impatient did the English people become of the very army that liberated them from the tyranny of James II. that they demanded its reduction even before the liberation became complete
; and to this day the British Parliament render a standing army practically impossible by only passing a mutiny act from session to session.
The alternative to a standing army is " a well-regulated militia ; " but this cannot exist unless the people are trained to bearing arms.