Billions of people have been born human and never been able to exercise such rights without facing repercussions, so ... claiming inalienability yet not accounting for the effective and de facto removal of them for the majority of the human experience seems like nothing more than an exercise in empty rhetorical tricks.

You honestly believe the concept of human rights is a "rhetorical trick"?

I believe that the idea that they are something anyone is naturally entitled to by God or nature is a rhetorical trick. Specifically, one employed to discount the value of a strong, functional government. I believe that the state of nature outside of that exposes the shallowness of "inalienability."

I believe they are something you have to continually fight for, and that can only be secured by a functional government (which itself is something that requires constant maintenance), vs something you can truly secure for yourself.

And in the particular case of the second amendment, I believe we are in a situation where a "right" granted by our constitution impairs on a right to live freely, free from interference and harm from others, that I personally consider more basic and more essential. The Constitution doesn't have an amendment discussing a right to not get shot, but I don't think that makes it less important.

There is no positive right to be free from harm. Such a right has never existed.

So why not? Why don't I have a right to not be killed by my fellow man? Why is it MORE IMPORTANT that my fellow man have a right to possess and carry weapons that could end my life?

How is the latter "inalienable" and the former is just wishful thinking? The only answer I can find is "because some people in the 18th century wrote one of them down, but not the other."

Wow, talking of rhetorical tricks. In this case, a textbook false dilemma.

The right to bear arms does not negate whatever right to safety you think you have. There are 300 million privately owned firearms in the US. Yet the odds of dying from a firearm homicide are quite small.

And the fun trick here is that "quite small" is meaningless, you would need to compare those odds against those in different countries with different laws...

Think through the implications. Hypothetically if you had the right to not be killed then that would imply that others would be required to do everything possible to protect you. Obviously that would be absurd.

Flagged for no good reason, so I will post it again, because I think it deserves a reply:

You are endorsing human rights abuses by oppressive governments like the Khmer Rouge because that government didn't extend the right to freedom from persecution to their subjects. You are suggesting that it was the Cambodian people's fault for not having a better government that granted them more rights.

This just seems to exemplify the purely-rhetorical aspect of the whole conversation about "natural rights."

"The government didn't extend the right to freedom from persecution" could be worded in any number of ways, such as "the government infringed on the inalienable rights of the people" but the fact that such an atrocity was committed says, to me, that claiming such rights are inherent, natural, or inalienable is rather useless. They clearly can be very easily violated. God or nature is not going to stop the violators, at least not during this life. So what good to the victims is a claim that the rights are inherent and a natural result of being born as a human?

Here is a different question - what makes it an atrocity? You could be technically correct and say "Because other people decided it." but that doesn't give any insight into why.

A natural rights framework has the thumbprint of a lawyer along with outmodedly telological way of thinking that can only see a wrong as a "crime" but is willing to construct justifications for what they already believe.

But mixed in the principles isn't just accepting "is wrong because I said so" as a proof. Thus it has contrived post hoc cruft to achieve consistency with assumptions but also underlying ethical principles.

You just admitted that it was an atrocity however. That implies the people who were killed had their rights violated. Your concept of rights granted by the government to the people is not self-consistent.

That's not a definition of atrocity that I'm familiar with. We could extend this to quibble about the definitions of evil, cruel, what have you, as well, but it's a wide diversion at this point. "Nature does not guarantee you anything" is not "there is no such thing as moral right or wrong."

Let's ask a different question: if there are inalienable rights, what is the complete set? Do you expect everyone to agree on what that set of rights is? If one person doesn't believe that guns are one of those, and another does, how do you break that tie? If there is truly a certain set of rights that's a law of nature, should everyone converge on the same set?

My point is that it is virtually impossible to establish the concept of wrongdoing without the notion of certain innate rights having been violated.

Each person has their belief of what they hold to be human rights. As human beings, it is the duty of each of us to protect what we respectively believe to be the rights of our fellow human beings.

Why not? Couldn't the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights be a "rhetorical trick"?

> Being born a human being is where those rights [free speech, bear arms] come from.

How does your theory account for the empirical observation that those rights are largely absent in much of the world?

It’s not a theory, it’s an axiomatic principle. Oppression does exist, and it’s an affront to that principle.

What's the general principle you use to determine that a right comes from being born a human?

It is perhaps the single most fundamental aspect of American culture. Though of course, certain people want to subvert that principle in order to aggregate power for themselves and their interest groups. I hope they eventually see the light and embrace America, or meet the same end as the redcoats.

American culture is a lot more narrow than being born human. Perhaps you should have said being born an American?

"We hold these truths to be self evident..."

Either you see them, or you don't. If you don't see them, explaining why is an exercise in futility.

The Declaration of Independence doesn't claim rights are derived from human nature, but that "certain inalienable rights" are "Endowed by [a] Creator."

So I guess that solves it. We can have all the guns we want because God said so.

The Declaration of Independence isn't part of the U.S. Constitution. The words "god" or "creator" don't appear in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that I'm aware of. It seems quite secular.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/

The Declaration of Independence is not a legally binding document either.

Thanks, that's what I was getting at if I was unclear. It predates the Constitution by more than a decade, with an abandoned Articles of Confederation in the middle.

It's historically important, but not legally meaningful when talking about the later US Constitution of 1789.

Honestly? Those words seem like they could be interpreted as being intended as timeless placeholders.

"Human rights" are a fiction, like money. The libertarian idea is that we collectively pretend human rights are real because doing so leads to empirically better outcomes in terms of human happiness, lack of suffering, etc.

So here's a question: has the absolutist interpretation of free speech and gun rights currently applied in the USA led to better outcomes than a more restricted interpretation? Well, let's see. We can compare the USA to other liberal democracies which do not acknowledge a near-absolute right to free speech, and have very strict gun laws -- like Germany, Canada, and New Zealand just to pick three. And if we do we find the USA is a dumpster fire compared to those countries, a place where white supremacism has run amok and schools must have active-shooter drills because of the ease with which nuts can get their hands on firearms.

So yeah, I'd say the more restrictive interpretation of human rights has, empirically, won out.

> “Human rights” are a fiction, like money.

There are countless dictators and tyrants who agree with you on that.