The tragic legacy of Constitution's ratification

I chuckle when I hear a gun advocate invoke the 2nd Amendment to promote the unrestricted manufacture and sale of machine guns and hands guns of enormous fire power. The near daily occurrence of a mass shooting of 4 or more makes no dent on their real concern this imagined sacred constitutional guarantee will be abridged in the slightest. My question to them is 'What slave patrol are you planning to participate in?'

The purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to ensure the new nation had a sufficient nationally controlled militia to repel foreign invasion or internal insurrection. But slave states feared federal control over state militias could doom their primary purpose of being state slave patrols to maintain totalitarian power of slaves. The new nation had already called upon free blacks to help win the Revolutionary War; a dangerous precedent to fearful slaveholders. To get Southern support for the Constitution, James Madison altered his original draft of the noxious amendment to declare that the purpose of a well regulated militia was to guarantee the security of a 'free state' instead of the original 'free country'. The political ploy worked, ensuring the Constitution's ratification. Alas, 235 years on the ocean of blood from over 100,000 killed and wounded annually is a ghoulish reminder of the cost incurred to birth our constitutional system.