reasonable restrictions

A thought occurred to me this morning while shaving – one primarily precipitated by yet another round of UBU52 loudly claiming she is not a bigot, despite her words indicating quite the opposite in the past.

The thought was a fairly simple one: anti-rights nuts like to go on and on and on about how all rights have limitations imposed upon their exercise, and how the rights protected by the Second Amendment should, of course, be no different. The obvious example given, time and time again, is how one supposedly cannot yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Unfortunately, that particular argument is nowhere near as rock-solid as the anti-rights nuts employing it might like, but that is not the tack I am going to take today.

Instead, for the sake of argument, I will simply accept the statement, “All rights should have limits,” as a face-value expression of fact.

So what limits shall we place on the rights protected by the Fifth Amendment? What if you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt (in your mind), that a natural-born American citizen is about to blow something up. What if a confession is all you would need to save hundreds, if not thousands, of lives? Shall we impose a limit on that citizen’s right to not incriminate himself, just because you are sure?

What restrictions are reasonable on the rights protected by the Seventh Amendment? After all, things would proceed a lot faster if we could just skip over that whole “jury” thing in cases where the evidence is pretty clear-cut, and it would save a lot of people a lot of time and money.

Hell, what would the anti-rights nuts consider to be acceptable limits on the rights protected by Third Amendment? Does anyone even remember what that one says any more? Does anyone actually care? And in situations where the National Guard is called out to help with emergencies, it surely would be easier and cheaper if people had to open their doors to them…

And then there is the right protected by the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments… I would be very interested in what UBU52 would consider to be “acceptable” limits on that particular right.

The problem with this little exercise is that pro-rights activists, like myself, typically only see one, solitary restriction on people’s rights as “acceptable”: your chosen method of exercising your rights cannot directly detrimentally affect other people. Falsely shouting, “Fire!” in a crowded theater with the intention of causing panic is a perfect example of that, but yelling, “Fire!” because there actually is one, or because it is part of the performance, is not. Anti-rights nuts, on the other hand, see anything they do not personally like as an opportunity to restrict another person’s rights.

Unfortunately, people like UBU52 will prattle endlessly about how they are not against guns, they are only against people carrying guns, so they are obviously not against the rights protected by the Second Amendment… or some other half-baked rationalization. Allow me to simplify the argument for them: the Second Amendment is not about guns. Oh, sure, it mentions firearms, somewhat prominently at that, but it is not actually about firearms.

The Second Amendment is about a citizen’s right to defend himself from aggressors, whether that aggressor is a streetcorner thug looking for quick cash, or whether that aggressor is the government overstepping its proscribed bounds.

And I will boil things down even farther: if you are against law-abiding citizens carrying firearms on their persons, you are against the natural right of self-defense.

… Which, conveniently enough, brings me full-circle back to a question I recently (and repeatedly) posed directly to UBU52 (the “repeated” bit was necessary due to her continued avoidance of it), which is just a continuation of a question I asked a long time ago of anti-rights nuts in general: how is discriminating against one right any better than discriminating against another right? Why is one right better than another? What is the difference? What method is used to make that determination? This information might prove to be useful in bridging the gap between anti-rights nuts and pro-rights activists, and yet none of the former has been willing to come forward with an answer.

I wonder why that is?

(If you want to see the other side of this particular argumentative coin, Bob S. has it all laid out for you.)