Yes indeed. The Second Amendment was instituted by men who had lived through the Revolutionary War, and some of whom had actually used the state-of-the-art military-grade shoulder-fired weapon... the "assault weapon" of its day... to go against not only civilian police (which largely did not exist at the time) but the career soldiers in the army of one of the leading global powers of the day.
Yes, they knew very well what they were doing, and they meant exactly that.