> Imagine if the US suddenly had a dictator
This is why we have the second amendment. And the constitution as the thing to which office-holders swear allegiance to rather than to "the party" or "the president".
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No, we have the second amendment as a safeguard against the government, at the state or federal level, relying on a separated class of professional armed personnel for internal and/or external security, with the idea that by retaining the capacity for the mass of the citizenry to be mobilized for that function, political pressure from the citizenry will be sufficient to avoid professionalization of more than a small cadre. In this way, tyranny would be prevented because you can't have a tyrant supported by the armed forces against the general citizenry when the armed forces and the general citizenry are exactly coextensive, and the armaments of the armed forces, while standardized by government, are held by the citizenry at large.
The second amendment was not created so that the amateurs with small arms would serve as a counterbalance against professional, better equipped troops of the standing army and internal security services. That's just a more recent rationalization by people who like to play with guns and fantasize aboit fighting off tyranny, but who either fetishize the professional forces and their separate authoritarian culture that the founders feared, or who just can't be arsed to do the boring work of a militia that is the primary security services of the state, or—frequently—who have both of those features simultaneously.