You are reading way, way, way more into it than the rest of us. Or me at least.MouthBQ98 said:
Wait: you are both saying to me that your rights supersede mine where they come into conflict. I say f--k that noise. Where our rights conflict, a court of law decides, we compromise, or we stay apart. There is no reasonable civilized alternative.
I consider myself a pretty strong civil libertarian, but at the margins where rights conflict you have to have reasonable and agreeable avenues to negotiate or compromise or settle or conflict or oppression results. Someone is going to get **** on if you are 100% absolutist in the observation of your own rights to the impairment of someone else's. This makes you an aggressor and oppressor. You cannot have a civil society without moral, civil, and reasonable individuals and cultural practices.
You both seem to be suggesting that natural and civil and legal rights magically never conflict. If that were true, government would be obsolete and we would be living in a utopian society. Unfortunately because we are individuals with diverse interests, we inevitably come into conflict and there is not always a clear hierarchy of rights in such a conflict. Where your exercise of your rights inflicts ACTUAL harm on someone else, is it still a right at that point? What if such harm is statistically inevitable, or extremely likely given known conditions, but simply hasn't come to its inevitable conclusion? You are ok with tipping over the first domino, knowing it will almost inevitably knock over the last? You are ok risking very likely or near certain and possibly irremunable harm to another in a clear chain of events that will unfold, when it could be prevented, simply because the actual point in time where the harm is inflicted has not yet occurred? I agree that the risk would have to be very clear and to s very high degree of likelihood and the potential harm very great to justify curtailing a natural civil right, but there is a point where you are saying that other people should be put at such risk simply to satisfy your own personal feelings of righteousness on the issue? Are you willing to take it to the ludicrous edge to prove your fidelity to absolutism? Can we put your child or spouse or friend in a room full of psychiatric patients with handguns for 24 hours and test your mettle, for example?
I'm saying that rights do not end simply because there is a perceived overlap, which is what you flat stated. If that were the case, he who can control the biggest circle of space (figuratively speaking) around them controls the most rights - that's not the case, though many wish it were the case.
Does my right to free speech end when you walk into hearing shot and decide you dislike my speech? Nope, my right to free speech does not end, no matter how much you think it should end. Does my right to own a firearm end because you are scared of what *may* happen at some point in the future or because you are scared of a tool (just to be clear, not "you" you, just using "you" in the general sense)? No, it does not, even if you think it should because of your own personal belief system or lack of education or what have you.
I think there is a disconnect between "rights" as in those specific rights granted by the Constitution and "rights" as in those rights that are created through additional law, court cases or simply by screaming louder and longer than anybody around you. Two completely different things.
The first is often overshadowed by the second simply because most people cannot disconnect the two. The second is what you are talking about, and why we do have courts and a theoretically impartial justice system to weigh opinion, judgment and punishment on.
To the second bolded part - that's pretty much 100% gun control advocate mentality right there, to use the context of this thread as a basis.