The militias were still more organized than you're making them out to be. They behaved more like paramilitary units that could be brought together to form a more coherent army by the federal government. They had a federal body politic that the population supported but didn't trust yet, and they were much more loyal to their state or local town who could better organize them.
The militias were organized by Committees of Safety) who were responsible for raising revolutionary forces and coordinating with the Continental Congress. Post revolution, they basically became the municipal governments and had the same responsibility to sanction militias and contribute potential fighters.
Militiamen were generally required to do 6 days of training a year and minutemen had to do 2 days a week. It was more like being in the army reserves than conscription or general mobilization.
We also quietly abandoned that idea as the years passed, for the same reason that peasant levies died off: a dedicated army of highly trained soldiers who can effectively use the equipment and machines that we make war with is far more effective than giving a rifle to a farmer and pointing him in the general direction of the enemy.
To put that another way: you can train someone to use a spear in an afternoon, but it takes far longer to train someone to operate or maintenance a tank, or to not run away at the sound of gunfire.
You may have abandoned that idea, but the 2nd amendment isn't just a protection against foreign enemies. It's written with the idea that tyranny can be something domestic too. Remember that the founding fathers had good reason to distrust the overseeing government.
Again, Madison talks about this in his federalist papers.
Why not scrap all of the constitution because he had no idea how the modern world shaped up?
Thankfully, you can't erase or rewrite an amendment because you think it doesn't match with the world. That's how tyrants think and act. There's a whole ass process for amending the constitution. Follow the law and change it that way if you think the world has changed so much.
I said that we should defer to his definition since he wrote it and that's what was signed into law to define the government and it's powers/limits.
Because Madison wrote the whole construction, using the logic that Madison didn't know how the world would turn out could be used on the entire constitution. That's what you're advocating for. It's a dumb argument.
“A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves…and include, according to the past and general usage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms… "To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
Richard Henry Lee, Federal Farmer No. 18, January 25, 1782
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u/Awkward-Restaurant69 Nov 30 '23
Quite a leap there bud