Yes, they were responding to the impossibly weak Articles of Confederation. The framers put several checks in place to prevent the federal government from becom

Yes, they were responding to the impossibly weak Articles of Confederation. The framers put several checks in place to prevent the federal government from becoming too powerful: 1) Enumerating the powers of the executive. There will be no King George in America! 2) Designing the checks & balances system such that (in theory) no one of legislative, executive, judicial could become too powerful to override the other two. 3) As you mentioned, the inclusion of the second amendment (and third, fourth, eighth) were all designed to prevent repeating problems the colonists faced before the war. 4) Tenth amendment was added to further strip the federal government of its non-enumerated powers. The framers wanted something stronger than AoC, but they were very clear in their desire to limit the power of the federal government. They wanted a weak executive, and the legislative, particularly the Senate, was designed to be the main "doer of things". The executive was initially quite powerless on purpose. When Jefferson tried to do the Louisiana Purchase, people challenged whether the executive had this power. Andrew Jackson then came along and began the journey of expanding the powers of the executive, followed by Lincoln suspending habeus corpus, and more modern figures such as FDR with the internment camps and New Deal all continuing to expand these powers. While this is obviously only a partial list of expansion, it contains several notable examples.