If the Bill of Rights would fail of ratification today, it is likely because of the Second Amendment. The modern progressive, and, about every Democrat candidate for President, deeply dislikes this right, and many of those candidates have talked about repealing the right to bear arms, modifying it, limiting it to law enforcement and the military, etc.
Many of them claim that the use of the term “Militia” in the amendment means that the right is a collective one, for national defense, and not an individual right. But recall that not only did the early American republic not have a large standing army, the Founders were wary of having one, knowing the dangers that one had posed during the colonial days. With no standing army, the “Militia,” that is, a mobilized armed citizenry, was the chief means of mutual protection; and those citizens had to possess their own firearms.
Let’s remember the reason that the “Minutemen” patriots (a militia if ever there was one) stood on Lexington Green on that April day in 1775: it was to prevent the British forces from seizing the arms at Concord. The powerful state, in other words, wanted to disarm the people; and the people knew what could happen if they had been disarmed. And the Founders, who lived through those days, knew it all too well – and they wanted to assure that the people would retain their natural right of self-defense, even against the newly-formed government of the United States. Remember, the former colonies had experienced oppression, and the Founders were well aware of the dangers that a non-responsive and oppressive government posed to the people.