[–] Drunkenst ago (edited ago)
Right exists hand in hand with responsibility. Rights can be abdicated by criminal actions. No fuq’d up sovereign citizen logic applies in a republic. You and I and everyone owe fellow citizens the inalienable right to life. If that right is threatened in such a way that the cops who rather not be bothered are called in to deal with a threat to a civilian life with a firearm that perpetrator is owed retribution. I’d prefer everybody carried, but so many stoopid wippipo who, notwithstanding the idiots, are the smartest race on planet Earth, can’t be trusted to handle the responsibilities attendant to firearm ownership. So again, unless you have stood shoulder to shoulder for a year with rapists and kidnappers and cold blooded killers, don’t try to convince somebody who has done so those scumbags have the rights to own weapons capable of lethal effect. Fuq those scumbags. Unfuq yourself.
[–] thelma 1 point -1 points 0 points (+0|-1) ago
Rights require no responsibility. They are yours. If you harm others then there are consequences. Once you pay the consequences (if mandatory) you are whole.
You have fallen into the trap...that citizens have to prove that they have the ability to exercise a right. Nothing is farther from the truth. You have zero obligation to do anything to exercise a right.
[–] Drunkenst ago (edited ago)
Not contending no difference between a right and a privilege. Rights are rules about what’s allowed or owed according to legal systems, ethical concepts or a civilization’s conventions. They are not absolute but neither are they infinitely malleable. Where distinctions are made about implementation depends on how you approach the origin of what’s allowed or owed. Rights can be revoked from a legal standpoint. In the broadest sense we all have the ethical right to self defense, but not necessarily the right to own and use a firearm where that right has been legally prohibited (you might say infringed) by statute owing to a criminal punishment.