The Second Amendment IS a reflection of the hostility toward standing armies. It is also a reflection of the hostility toward any government attempt to disarm the people, such as transpired in occupied Boston in 1775.
Please explain how there could ever be an armed collective of people incapable of perpetrating outrages against the people?
Please explain how such collectives differ in any critical manner from a "standing army".
Please explain why the Second Amendment does not say:
"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the state to maintain an armed militia shall not be infringed."
If your understanding of the Second Amendment is correct, please explain why the alternate version above was not adopted. What "right", aside from maintaining an armed militia, is protected according to your understanding of the Second Amendment?
Please expains why you see gun Ownership as an absolute rather than a relative right? Each person has the right of self-defence against his neighbor, but that does not extend to arming each person with a certain kind of weapon to defend himself. Ultimately he has the right of armed resistence to the government, which is to say the right to revolution, but I cannot see this as anything but a collective action. The preservative of liberty is necessarily a political action. As to your wording, the American concept of the state is not an absolute term. An American state is unitary in form, but federal in its constitution, by which I do not mean the forms of governmenbt but its social make-up. It is, in other words, a bottom to top entity, a collection of neighhoods, towns, counties and regions rather loosely gathered at the state level. These were once the bases of the militia system, and were certainly so in 1789, when the 2nd Amendmnt was written. Given the way that our country was formed, the citizen-soldier is primary. Ipso facto he must be armed.