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Certain rights are (imho) inherent and inalienable. For example, no matter if your IQ is 150 or 50, if you are age 1 or 120, you have (imho) a right not to be tortured.
Other rights are more conditional, some to the point where they might be considered privileges. Often these are rights which come with responsibilities. Driving a car on a public road would be a prime example: because cars are vastly more dangerous to the general public than bicycles, you generally need a license to drive them. It is still kind-of a right in that you typically have a right to try to get your license, and most governments can not deny it just because they dislike your skin color or something.
Nobody I am aware of argues that 2A describes an inherent, inalienable and unconditional right. Even the NRA will not arm toddlers. The absolute minimum to me seems to be that the gun owner will be generally found to be responsible for their own actions, which Hassan would fail. (Even if someone was generally of sound mind but had periodic episodes of diminished culpability, e.g. due to binge drinking, the decision to own a firearm would make me very unsympathetic towards a defendant who was accused of shooting someone under influence.)
Even if Hassan would never shoot anyone, it seems to me that he will get into situations where him being visibly armed would increase the stakes tremendously. A possibly deranged person mumbling to himself on the sidewalk is only a nuisance in many situations. Give him a gun belt, and that assessment changes completely. From my understanding, NJ does not allow any open carry, so this might be a practical issue. (Of course, NJ also requires a license for concealed carry, which he is unlikely to get. I am not sure how well "if you carry a gun bought in the Carolinas in NJ you are breaking the law" conversation would go, though.)
The cops which did the welfare check on him seem mostly chill from your description, but I would assume that they would be a lot less chill if they had a reasonable suspicion that he was packing.
Taking advantage of the gun show loophole requires considerable agency. You have to save up enough cash, find a show, find a way to travel there (presumably he is not driving a car?). Knowing how to ride a bus without conveying to the guy in the next seat that you are (1) mentally unsound and (2) on you way to buy a gun would be helpful as well.
Even sane people will sometimes voice aspirations which they will not follow through, from visiting far-away countries to quitting their jobs. "I am gonna go to NC to buy a gun there, for self-defense, youknow" could be just such a thing. Of course, if he is telling you he already found a gun show and transportation, that would seem a lot more concrete.
One flaw about modern bureaucracies is that sometimes there is nobody in the loop who has the authority (and balls) to pull the brakes and stop doing something counter-productive. If you tell the authorities that he has ideations about gun ownership, the default response would be him getting visited by cops who give him another talk. Given that this will be perceived as "gay cops are oogling me again", this will likely be counter-productive.
I guess you're not at all familiar with the topic then.
Here's Hobbes:
Here's Locke:
And it is of course explicitly because of this conception of a natural right of self defense, which was specifically popular in the early American Republic that the Anti-Federalists decided to include it in the Bill of Rights which they saw as necessary to secure against violation of natural rights that may come from the powers granted to the State through the Constitution.
To quote Hardy:
The second amendment was indeed understood to secure an inherent right to self defense. Much of it was implicit in the minds of its drafters due to the fact that English common law recognized it as a background principle, but it was actually talked about specifically in the constitutional ratification debates that preceded the bill of rights.
St. George Tucker writes in 1803 in the earliest published scholarly commentary on 2A:
The thing about people using violence to defend what they perceive to be their natural rights is that absent some consensus about what these other rights are and what the ground facts are, these claims will overlap.
For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.
Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.
This is certainly a valid conception of natural rights, but also a rather trivial one: might makes right. It generally leads to long-lived feuds between clans and families which have wronged each other.
Hobbes speaks of "Judgement, and Reason", Locke of "to judge, whether they have just cause". This sounds to me like implicit prerequisites to the right to self-defense: if your judgement is obviously impaired, it seems unlikely that society will respect your right to self defense. (I still think they are overly optimistic if they believe that reasonable people will not make overlapping claims wrt their natural rights, but that is besides the point.)
Of course, we can argue if philosophically, a toddler or a psychotic has a right to defend themselves against what they perceive as violations of their natural rights, but pragmatically, all historical societies which I am aware of have avoided giving the means for effective self defense to these groups. The right not to get tortured or killed is a right which most civil societies bestow to any humans in their jurisdiction from the moment they are born. Other rights, e.g. the right to vote, or carry effective means for self defense, or consent to sex are granted conditionally. (Related potential scissor statement: "as the right to bear arms is a consequence of the natural right of self defense, illegal immigrants should be allowed to bear arms").
All societies consider trade-offs when it comes to enabling their people to practice self-defense. As @cjet79 has pointed out, guns are excellent tools for self-defense. But the kind of guns which are legal to own in the US are probably not what is always optimal for self-defense.
For example, consider tamper-resistant explosive vests as a weapon for deterring rapists. If a potential victim packing a firearm will deter 80% of the would-be rapists, wearing a well-known rape prevention vest which works by turning the wearer and anyone within five meters into bite-sized chunks whenever its sensors detect that a rape attempt is happening might deter 90% (all the ones who believe that they could startle their victim before she can draw). Yet despite offering marginal gains, wearing such a device in public would be illegal everywhere in the world, because societies will not consider the benefits in isolation but also the trade-offs. If the device blows up one subway car full of people by accident per three marginal rapes it prevents, that means that it has negative utility for broader society.
The difference between Texas, New York, and Germany is simply that the societies balance these trade-offs slightly differently.
You misunderstand. It is inarguable that they do in fact have such a right. Nature provides that they do. An insane person can decide to just revolt and kill anybody they perceive as a threat. The world is structured in a way that makes this impossible to totally prevent.
The question that you decide to shift this to here isn't whether this is a natural right, but whether such a natural right ought to be enforced by the government, inasmuch as it doesn't violate other rights.
The idea that this is not a natural right is incoherent with your line of reasoning unless you embrace the Roussean view that there is now essentially no such thing, and that all rights have become civil rights which are provided at will by the State which is now the font of all such things.
The problem you have is that the US was founded specifically in a rejection of this concept and an embrace of the idea that rights are ordained by God, not the State. Under the theory that good government is government that recognizes natural law and aligns itself with the liberties that God provided us as much as it practically can.
You may disagree with this policy, but unlike you are claiming, this is a difference of nature, not of degree. This is why Charlie Kirk said that some gun deaths may be worth it and why his opponents can't fathom how he could say such a thing, because this isn't about some consequential end of State policy, but about the deontological application of natural law.
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Just to be surei understand you, do you believe in a right to self defense?
Like are we disagreeing that this is a fundamental right, or are we just quibbling about whether guns fall into an extension of that right?
This is absolutely not the equilibrium. If we are gonna use the terms of economics I'd say there are very high transaction costs for violence.
The equilibrium is more like: you can use violence or the threat of violence to protect a few things that you greatly care about. The things you can protect or enact with violence are heavily limited by what others are willing to protect with violence.
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All rights are conditional and they are broken all the time. E.g. the torture right was famously broken in Guantanamo, many people consider things like prolonged solitary imprisonment as torture. Other people also argue that not having access to euthanasia constitutes a torture etc. In my opinion rights are neither inherent or inalienable. They are just strongly worded laws, they can be changed or added or removed - there literally is a process of amending US bill of rights or UN declaration of Human Rights etc.
Andrew Wilson also famously often points out the essence of rights - right is just entitlement absent duty. The problem is that the entitlement has to be enforced. In that sense any right depends on willingness of other people - either private persons or more often governments - to act. If they are unwilling or unable to do so, then poof - your right is gone.
Additionally in my experience the whole language around rights is just secular version of religious dogmas, a feeble attempt to ground the secular ideology in some wordplay. Saying a slogan X is a right seems as if it is something transcendental and grounded, not that it is just made up idea that has no basis other than as a tautology.
How does that distinguish rights from the concept of morality itself? Right and wrong as ideas are already not transcendental and grounded (at least in many worldviews). They are just language frames used to express commitments and to systematically boo/yay different types of behaviour. And we can't do without that.
My view on this is that the law is minimum of morals, while rights are just extra strongly worded form of laws. What I object is some wordplay - or equivocation - on the side of secularists, as if rights have some higher grounding and are to be implicitly followed. Let's use some example, most civilization have morality against murder encoded into their laws. Does then make any sense to say, that you have a right not to be murdered? I don't think so, murder is already prosecuted, stating it as a right does not add anything. And yet people talk about right to housing or free healthcare and other things as if they are stronger in this sense.
Exactly, that is my point. Rights is just a strong word aimed to provoke some emotional response, nothing more, nothing less. It is just strongly worded preference - you have right to abortion, you have right to body autonomy, you have right to free healthcare, you have right to freedom of movement etc. But there is no grounding for it other than that some people just feel strongly about this, and that they wish to impose it on society. Maybe Aztecs could have worded that everybody has right to be protected from wrath of Huītzilōpōchtli by sacrificing slaves.
Additionally even in in practice this is just a mirage - anybody who lived through COVID should already understand that this is all just fiction, the situation can change on a dime and former right is nullified just like that. There is no thunder from the sky striking somebody taking your supposed right away.
All this is to demonstrate, that there are no "inherent" or "inaliebable" rights especially from secularist perspective. The only way it would make sense is to describe some physical reality - e.g. you have an inherent "right" to fall when you jump. Otherwise it does not make any sense, there is no inherentness or inalienability for any actual rights as these are just some judicial constructs subject to change, indifference and all these kind of things.
I kind of agree that the language of rights is obfuscatory as to what is really going on, sometimes implying that a right is something metaphysical, though I suppose this is true of a pretty wide range of concepts. However, I think that rights talk does accomplish something real. I see rights as a legit expression of commitment to/hope that there are some core rules of human morality that transcend any particular legal system and that deserve to be incorporated into every legal system by one means or another. It is of course true that people then change their mind about torture being wrong, for example, and go ahead and do it. But at least rights provide a clear stake in the ground that countries, having signed up to a bill of rights, must renege on, proving that the values they once claimed are no longer/never were their true values. This should be at least embarrassing though perhaps we have entered an age where double standards and reversals of this kind no longer incur any shame.
I am not sure. Take my example with murder which is almost universally prosecuted across time and cultures. Do people think about murderers in terms of them acting against some inherent right? Does it add anything into the conversation above universally accepted moral stance of murder is bad? And even then there are some examples, where polity can actually define conditions around which killing us unlawful and thus constitutes a murder and which one is lawful and condoned - e.g. killing as part of death sentence or assassinating head of terrorist organization with a bomb etc. It is not as if we are talking about something inherent and inalienable, there are always conditions around it.
I think that what rights really represent culturally is a declaration of some secular or civic version of religious dogma. Politicians - either national or those sitting in UN - are akin to council of bishops or rabbis and theologians, who from time to time sit together and make some moral proclamation that abortions or something like that is now okay and in fact anybody stopping them is anathema to the church polity and will be punished. They have theological discussion about morality of current rights and how to do proper exegesis of the holy text of Constitution or Bill of Rights or even if to outright amend it. But the authority lies with them, the rights in this sense are given and not inherent and definitely not inalienable.
What I want to say is that I do not recognize this authority of rights as some universal morality, to me rights are just present set of laws or maybe as you said a present set of aspirations of lawmakers. I will for instance never in a million years morally recognize anything like right to abortion in this moral sense no matter how many wise men try to persuade me or how many people use it as a slogan on the street. Othere people let's say do not recognize right to bear arms or other rights.
Additionally I do not like the vocabulary of rights exactly because it is pure language of entitlement absent duty. Good society with good laws and even rights is result of hard work. If the society is bad then all you are entitledto is misery.
I kind of agree with you – yes, lawyers and politicians who decide on bills of rights are playing a role akin to religious councils. I would just say that there are those who do not interpret such a role as necessarily involving any metaphysical commitment. 'Ruling Passions' by Simon Blackburn is interesting on this, as an example of someone who is advocating for a quasi-realist position wrt morality (including rights), where we continue talking as if moral proclamations are 'out there' in the world, while also acknowledging that what is going on under the surface is fundamentally to do with our attitudes and sentiments rather than something we've discovered independent of us.
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I would say that the right to self defense is an inherent, inalienable, and unconditional right. And I'm definitely not alone in that belief.
The second amendment is just an offshoot of that right, as guns are one of the best tools for self defense.
Just like freedom of speech is mostly useless if the government says "you can say whatever you want, just not in a newspaper or online or anywhere we can see it".
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In practice, there is not a generally available 'gun show loophole'. It's possible that you, enterprising prohibited person, will find a vendor not covered by background check requirements at a gun show, but it's not very likely.
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