Headline March 18, 2018/ ''' MIGHTS -POWER- RIGHTS '''

''' MIGHTS -POWER- RIGHTS '''

IN THE LAST TWO MONTHS, law enforcement authorities in California took a gun away from a 38-year old man-

Who had threatened - to kill himself, his wife and their young child if she left him

They removed three weapons from a 23-year old ex-Marine who, the authorities said, had developed a paranoia that all males wanted to harm him.

And they took a handgun from a 39-year-old man who terrified neighbors reported that he had been firing his weapon in the backyard; the man, who said he thought he was aiming for raccoons and rats, was found to be intoxicated, the police said.

THE DECLARATION of Independence, whose ''unalienable rights'' individualists are so quick to claim for themselves, dealt with rights similarly.

In legal parlance, to ''alienate'' something is to exchange it for an equivalent - precisely what individuals do with their rights when they form a political community.

The Declaration's rights are coherently ''unalienable'' only if they are possessed by what the document calls ''one people''.

This interpretation is backed by the fact that many of the complaints against King George that the document proceeds to enumerate are not that he did something absolutely forbidden but rather that he did so without the legislature's consent.

In one of the cheaper applause lines, Mr. LaPierre cut to the heart of this issue : ''We, the people, are in charge of this country,'' he declared.

*But polls show that the people overwhelmingly support more restrictions on guns*.

As Randy E. Barnett, a constitutional theorist whose conception of individual liberty animated the legal challenge to the Affordable care Act, has written, everything hinges on whether ''we the people''  refers to a community or a collection of individuals.

Mr. Barnett concludes the latter, as apparently does Mr. LaPierre, who went on to repeatedly invoke  ''individual rights'' as the essence of the American republic.

In this, they differ from James Madison, the man behind the Bills of Rights. Introducing his amendments to Congress with the lukewarm remark that they were not ''altogether useless.''

Madison cast them as a protection for the people against the encroachments of the government, not as a means of preventing the majority of the people from acting on its understanding of the public good.

On the contrary, Madison specifically rued the fact that his amendments would not prevent the majority from abusing the minority.

Madison thought the Bill of Rights  might help discourage the community from abusing political minorities, but he did not see it as a legal barrier to majority decisions.

Instead, Madison wrote that in situations in which political minorities were aggrieved, they were responsible for persuading the majority of their views and and had to acquiesce if they failed.

Alexander Hamilton argued that the Constitution's invocation of ''we the people'' better protected what he suggestively called ''popular rights'' than their formal recitation in a Bill of Rights.

Far from being absolute, the Second Amendment is perhaps the clearest example of the Constitution situating rights in the context of public good.

It refers to the right of ''the people'' to keep and bear arms because the framers of the Constitution preferred state militias to a standing national army.

The public context of the right is similar to the difference between Constitution protecting the capacity of speech, which would allow the proverbial cry of ''fire'' in a crowded theater, and the First Amendment's reference to ''freedom'' of speech.

The latter is a legal concept that incorporates the possibility of limits.   

This political conception of rights - that they can be adjusted for the public good, subject to the rule of law  - largely prevailed until the courts began understanding rights as instrument of individual fulfillment and desire.

The inevitable result was what the conservative political philosopher Harvey C. Mansfield has called the belief that ''no right is safe unless it can be carried to the extreme.''

In this Sense, Mr. Wayne LaPierre's, the leader of National Rifle Association, has far more in common with the political opponents whom he stigmatized as socialists than he acknowledges,

It is a staple of progressive rhetoric on individual rights that they must be protected at their outer limits lest exercises of freedom short of the extremes become threatened

Assertions of speech and press rights that accord pornography nearly boundless First Amendment protection lest the nation stumble down the slippery slope of political censorship in partake of this tendency.

So does the ever expanding right to privacy, support for which often takes the form of arguing that if the government is allowed to restrict one activity, it will be similarly empowered to regulate others.

This rigidly individualist' understanding of rights is a bipartisan phenomenon.

The insistence on an absolute interpretation of rights lead to the absurdity of all-or-nothing solutions like arming everyone, including class room teachers, rather than regulating anyone.

The slaughters at a high school in Florida, a church in Texas and a concert in Las Vegas suggest that the common good is not only-

An older standard for rights but also a better one.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all ''register'' on !WOW! - The World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:


''' Power & Rights '''

Good Night and God Bless

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