In $MAJOR_CITY suburbia, you can call 911 and expect police or fire response within 5-15min.
In $RURAL Texas, response times may be significantly longer which helps to explain a self-reliance culture.
Property theft deterrence, prevention, and enforcement being neatly bundled in the revolver at your hip (think 1850s “old west” town) is what was codified into law in Texas. Particularly theft of horses (eg: mobility or necessary farm labor) was severely punished.
Different challenges often call for different responses to be most effective, and it’s helpful to try and understand the situation and expectations before passing judgement.
So, the government/state has guaranteed a negative right to life, i.e. citizens are prohibited from actions that deprive someone's right to life, and in order to enforce this prohibition, citizens are deprived of their right to arbitrarily commit violence to each other, while the government/state has a monopoly.
Where does our right to arbitrarily commit violence come from? Is it just a "natural right"?
In fact, a Texan may also believe that since you have no right to violence, it would be perfectly fine for a police officer to stop you from using deadly force, as long as that police officer doesn't use deadly force on you!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
for example, people have a "negative" right to be free of physical violence. If someone uses physical violence an another, that person forfeits their rights, and the state can use violence against them. It can also take away their freedom of movement and incarcerate them.
Agreed - rights that are guaranteed by prohibiting certain actions, i.e. you have a right to $FOO, meaning that $BAR is prohibited.
Compare with:
> They conceptualize rights "negatively", as things the state shouldn't take away from you.
The formulation seems a little different: you have a right to $FOO, meaning that $BAR is allowed ("the state shouldn't take [$BAR] away from you").
You have a negative right to freedom from the state: the state can't lock you up without a good reason.
Also relevant, you have a negative right to your property: someone can't take your property from you.
Contrast with a postive-right versions of these two things, right to due process and right to property protection by the police.
In the positive rights case, the state extends property protection via the law and police, thereby implicitly granting you property rights. This is a grant, and you are not allowed to defend your own property?
That's my rough reading of ops text.
If you down the rabbit hole far enough, rights do not come from anywhere other than the extent to which an opposing party is able to punish you. Aka, might makes right.
An actual direct democracy, like Switzerland, isn't as great as protecting minority rights. There's plenty of examples of democracies trampling minority rights, and there is a legitimate fear of tyrannical majority in most democracies.
America is quite unique in its system and how well it protects rights.
Many Texans conceptualize government and state uses of force (ie prosecution that can lead to imprisonment) as restrictions on their rights. This "negative rights" conceptualization is pretty common in the US, but especially common in Texas.
In the specific case of using deadly force to prevent somebody from stealing your property at night, the idea is something like the following. Absent any government intervention, you have a "property right" which allows you to prevent the thief from taking the property. In some cases, the balance of public policy concerns should lean in favor of government restrictions on this property right, to protect potentially innocent people or to prevent nonviolent criminals from dying, or to sustain an orderly justice system without vigilantes.
However, many Texans believe that the government should not intervene in this case because the restriction on an individual's right to protect his/her property is more important than the other policy goals.
Like I said, this is just my attempt to articulate the way I'd guess many Texans feel about this. I don't necessarily agree with all of the above.