[dragonwriter]

> The 2nd amendment made a lot of sense when weaponry consisted of horses and rifles

Around the time of the founding, there was privately-owned field artillery (and rifles were still in limited deployment).

The second amendment made sense when calling up the militia/posse comitatus was an essential feature of how the government at all levels dealt with internal and external security threats, such that it was not planning to meet such needs with fully professional forces is most cases.

Note that this was true, in both internal and external cases, for much of the life of the Republic though less so over time; for external security the idea was essentially written off after Vietnam with the adoption of the all-volunteer force. For internal security it's just about as dead, though there's not an equivalent milestone.

[jboggan]

We still have privately owned field artillery, among other things:

https://youtu.be/qtFczo5ZCwY?t=934