You are exactly right. What the second amendment describes is a citizen army of the Swiss kind, where the public is entrusted with guns only for the public good. And while in general I oppose reading of Constitutions that are time-specific, it is all too clear that the context of this Amendment is very local and transient - the experience of the use of foreign British and mercenary troops to defend American soil, a defence which soon turned into pressure against the Americans themselves. The whole notion has no place in modern America, and indeed it was never really set into action even in the earliest days: the Continental Army was shaped by Washington into a standing army - not perhaps the most effective of its time, but a regular army capable of being sent wherever Congress and Washington needed, from New England all the way to Yorktown, Virginia. And so it went; for most of its history, America did not have much of an army, but in so far as it had one at all, it was a regular, professional army. The concept of the militia was stillborn, leaving behind only a citizenship armed to the teeth to little constructive purpose.