The Founders decided not to have a standing army, and instead rely on "well-regulated militias". In order to have functioning militias it was necessary to ensure that they be armed. That is how the 2nd should be read.
Nope.
The Founding Fathers, who wrote it, made it clear that the people are the militia. They weren't talking about forming the National Guard.
For instance, George Mason, who co-authored the Second Amendment:
"I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” -- Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 14, 1778
"That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." -- Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776
Richard Henry Lee wrote in
Letters From the Federal Farmer to the Republican, Letter XVIII, January 25, 1788 that "
A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves" and made it clear that it "
include all men capable of bearing arms" and added that
"The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle."
The position that the Second Amendment guarantees a right of individual Americans to own and carry (private ownership), was embraced by every known legal scholar in the 19th century who wrote about the Second Amendment (although several wrote about its limitations, all considered it an individual right), and is the consensus of most modern legal scholarship. Any claim to the contrary is pure historical revisionism.
To start, St. George Tucker, a judge and law professor from Virginia, published an edition of Blackstone’s
Commentaries, in 1803, to which he added explanations of how it related to American law, including the new Constitution. Soon after
Tucker’s Blackstone became nearly universally regarded as being the leading American authority on both Blackstone and American law.
Tucker addressed the Second Amendment at several points, clearly stating that it protected the individual, natural right of self-defense. After quoting the amendment he wrote (which directly addresses your standing army assertion):
"This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty... The right of self defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."
Moreover, in his notes concerning Blackstone’s description of the individual's right to have and use arms for self-defense, Tucker applauded the Second Amendment's "
right of the people" for being "
without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government." In everything that Tucker wrote he explained that the right belonged to the individuals and not to some collective state right.
William Rawle of Pennsylvania, who had turned down an offer by George Washington to be the nation’s first Attorney General, published his
View of the Constitution of the United States of America in 1825 with a second edition printed in 1829. In it, especially in the second edition, he made it clear that the right to keep and bear arms belonged to the ordinary citizen, writing that
"No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people."
This same view can again be seen in the highly influential 1833
Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States by Supreme Court Justice and law professor Joseph Story, as well as in his later
Familiar Exposition of the Constitution. By paraphrasing the "
right of the people" as the "right of the citizens" --
not of States or members of a militia -- Story left no doubt that he meant the right to belong to individuals. He unequivocally stated that
"the right of the citizens to keep, and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic."
Story was even more direct in his
Familiar Exposition when he wrote:
"One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is by disarming the people and making it an offense to keep arms."
Though less prominent than his father Henry Tucker (son of St. George) shared the view of the Second Amendment as securing an individual right. In an 1831 commentary he exclaimed:
"The right of bearing arms ... is practically enjoyed by every citizen, and is among his most valuable privileges."
And this view was the one expressed after the Civil War as well (Woods 1886, Black 1895) as well as in how the Freeman Bureau Act of 1866, referred to the rights of the people included
"the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens of such State or district without respect to race or color, or previous conditions of slavery."
Samuel Adams said during the debates of the Massachusetts Convention on February 6, 1788:
"and that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms"
In the “Federalist No. 29” Alexander Hamilton clearly and unambiguously states that membership in a well-regulated militia is not required for the right to keep arms.
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