Donald Trump has said that he will not become a dictator if he becomes US president again except “on day one”, after warnings from Democrats and some Republicans that the US was in danger of becoming an autocracy if he wins the 2024 election. Fuck, well at least he’s honest on this statement
It’s a bit of both. In the 18th century, it was abundantly obvious a country needed to be able to defend itself against both foreign powers and internal threats. But it was also very clear that if you paid a group of people to be professional soldiers, you basically always lived under the threat of those people going “That’s a nice country/state you have there” and launching a coup.
Hence the well-regulated militia, because then you don’t need a proffesional military, and there’s nobody to launch a coup, and also no way for the federal government to take over individual states. So in a way, it WAS to prevent government overreach, but not in the wat it’s usually said.
And, in any case, it’s laughable to think that a group of armed Americans could stand up to the US military if an American dictator ordered them to attack US citizens and they obeyed such an order.
The citizens would be charging in with guns blazing, but the military would send in a few drones and wipe them out. The whole “guns would let us stand against a dictatorship wielding the might of the US military” idea is a fantasy.
The fact that the right is that one that parrots this line while supporting someone who is actively saying he’ll be a dictator and send the military against US citizens blows past ironic and lands in Downright Scary territory.