Posted by
Andrews on Thursday, June 26, 2008 1:43:17 PM
In looking at the Supreme Court decision on gun rights, or at least the excerpts I can find right now, I see a basic problem in the thinking of the liberal justices. And it is a problem that seems to be common to many, liberals more than conservatives, but something to which neither side is completely immune.
Some people just cannot recognize that rights are absolute.
The rights a citizen possesses are absolute. You do not have a right to "property except..." or a right to "liberty except...". These rights can be stripped form you upon conviction by the state, but otherwise your right is absolute, not conditional.
Yet the justices seem to miss that. Breyer argues "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right
guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house
in crime-ridden urban areas." And that is just absurd. The right exists or it doesn't, there is no right to keep arms except in places where it is bad. Either it is a right, and absolute, or it is not a right.
To say we have a right except when the state decides we don't is to treat us all as convicts, since that is the one group from which the state can strip rights. But that seems to be the position of the justices. Stevens seems to think the constitution exists for the purpose of granting government power, rather than protecting citizens, as he argues that it is wrong that the majority "would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a
choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to
regulate civilian uses of weapons."
In other words, instead of rights, Stevens see restrictions on government. And, as those restrictions get in the way of good government, Stevens seems to argue that rights exist only at the sufferance of the state.Somehow I think the founders would be horrified to imagine a future Supreme Court justice would see things in those terms.
And the funny part is that the left sees rights in these terms only for selected rights. Were someone to see voting rights or free speech rights in these terms the same justices would be shocked. They would never argue that free speech should be limited by governmental needs (excluding campaign finance, of course), and they certainly would never allow voting rights to be limited by the needs of government. Yet they will argue exactly that when it comes to property or gun rights.
The time has come for citizens and judges to understand rights properly. First, rights are individual, they always apply to a single person. Rights are entirely negative, they restrict what the state and others can do to you, they do not obligate you or anyone else to do anything. Finally, they are absolute, barring criminal conviction they may not be taken away from you.
Until we understand those simple truths, it is unlikely any other efforts at reforming the state will have any success. Knowing what rights are and are not needs to be the first step in any change we make.
POSTSCRIPT
One more thing we need to realize, despite the popularity of the term, there are no "collective rights". All rights are individual.
The rights which we grant to the government are still individual rights. For example, we have the right to self defense. However, to make its application more orderly and effective, we grant as individuals this right to the state, which then acts on our behalf. However, we still retain the right to defend ourselves, when we authorize the state to act on our behalf it does not remove that right from us. Nor does it create some "collective right to defense".
What the state holds is a host of individual rights to self-defense, rights whose owners have deputized the state to act on their behalf. It is still an individual right, collective "rights" just do not exist.
Which has one additional implication, there is no right except those every citizen possesses. There is no way a citizen can grant a right to the state he does not possess, and the state has no rights except those the citizens grant to it. So whatever the state can do, an individual can as well, at least as concerns his own affairs.
If we understood that it would make for a much more free public, and a much less powerful government.