Now, I feel that the exceptions have become the norm and with each passing event, are creeping in every aspect of our lives. Turning it around - Our rights are always violated, we sometimes get to exercise them.
The very notion that you have something means that it can be taken away, unless like you said, you have the means to defend it. Contrast that with something you are, not have. That can only change, not taken away.
That sounds like 18th-century thinking. In that era, "natural rights" seemed a reasonable notion because people could agree on the existence of a higher authority (even if it was a pretty aloof Deist-type God) that bestowed those rights inalienably on each and every person. But that idea has become increasingly discredited, and in the 19th century other schools arose with their positions that "rights" are merely an invention of human societies for the purposes of those societies.
However, without a shared higher moral authority, I can claim whatever rights I want and you can't tell me otherwise. All you can do is forcibly remove my ability to freely exercise them, and all I can do is forcibly defend my ability to enjoy them. Hence the existence of the USA's second amendment.
I think this is a perspective encouraged by those in power. I think that a slightly different, but truer analysis is that our rights are always there, but often violated.