How do I know my Rights?

What rights do you have? How do you know? These are not ethereal questions relegated to philosophy class. These are questions that must be answered by each of us. Let me show you how to easily determine what your rights are.

Follow me in this reasoning if you would: I'm alive. Do I have a right to this life I currently posses? Yes. Do I have any other rights because of my life? Yes, lets start with the most basic ones. If I have a right to my life it means I have the right to maintain my life. Thus because I need food and water and shelter and clothing, I have a right to these things because they preserve my life.

If I have a right to my life, and therefore the right to sustain my life, do I also have a right to my body? The obvious answer is yes, I have right to leave this world with all the pieces I came in with.

If I have a right to my life, and my body, what do I do if something threatens the integrity of my body,  my shelter, my food, my water, or my life directly? Do I have a right to eliminate the threat imposed on myself and/or those necessities that keep me alive?

Well do I? If I don't my life will end, or be severely compromised eventually leading to my demise. If I don't have the right to defend these things then what does the "right" to these things mean?

Without the right to defense, all of these things which we clearly have a right to are meaningless. Thus, yes I do have a right to eliminate a threat to my life, body and necessities.

How is that done? How do I defend myself? The answer changes throughout history, but the answer can be summed up as: matching and preferably exceeding the force of the threat so as to stop and eliminate it.

In the past this would have meant a club, or a dagger maybe. Later a bronze sword, maybe a sickle. Later still an iron, then a steel sword, then a bow, crossbow, and then various primitive firearms. Each weapon becomes obsolete as technology advances. If a thief jumped you with a dagger and you drew a flintlock pistol you properly preserved yourself and your possessions by exceeding the force of the threat. If the thief had jumped you with a flintlock pistol you would have only matched the force, and may not live to tell about it.

Thus your right to defense extends, not to any specific object, but to the pinnacle of defensive weaponry of the day. If you don't have access to such weaponry, you risk becoming a victim from some one who does have access.

By this reasoning then, I have a right, as a living being, to defend my life, all that it encompasses, and that which is necessary to sustain it with the best weaponry of my day so that I can achieve parody with, or preferably exceed the force of my attacker, regardless of who or what my attacker may be.

If I don't have this right, if I am to stay limited in my defense by artificial laws imposed upon me by another, what does that mean? If I don't have a right to the best technology of the day for my defense, doesn't  that put the threats to my life and necessities at an advantage? And since the threats now have preferential treatment, what does that say of my life? The threats to my life are not bound by the laws of man, if they were, then the laws of men would eliminate them.

The answer is my life is reduced in value if I am denied the ability to defend myself with the best weapons of my day.

By this reasoning, any one who imposes laws upon me that reduce my ability to defend myself are devaluing my life, and putting it at risk, and thus are a threat themselves.

What rights then do I have to protect myself against those who can make laws that can harm me? Obviously I would need a way to defend myself from them, yet force is the last method one should seek with authority. Thus I must obviously have the right to speak out, so that my complaints can be heard and others can know my plight. I would also have the right to assemble with others who share in my complaint, or cause for standing up to authority alone is almost always futile.

But authority despises any insolence, however peaceable it may be, and would desire to shutdown any attempt to influence the people to change it's rule. Thus I would also have a right to privacy, which would preclude the powers that be from monitoring my actions taken in the privacy of homes and gatherings.

You see, our rights all derive from one simple aspect: our life. Our rights exist to preserve our life, and expand it's vitality and quality. Every freedom which neither steels from another nor harms their person is validated by this truth: all life seeks not to survive but to thrive.

When you realize that what is true of the rights of one, is true of all mankind, then you realize that these rights benefit society as a whole, each person thriving to the best of their ability. It is a standard rarely met in this world, yet in nature it is clear to see that every creature strives for it none the less, and those societies who permit the most freedom while still retaining the ability to punish crimes against others are the most prosperous.

Thus your rights can be summarized in one statement:

Because I am alive I have a right to my life and all it encompasses and to all means of preserving all that I am and have attained, without infringing upon the same of any other except through preservation of my and my own.

Did She do the Right Thing?

It was the worst day of her life. She stood there shaking, the children were screaming. There was blood on the wall, on the floor, and on some of the desks. Her ears were ringing and the smell of gun powder had just reached her nose.

There was no more movement, he was dead. Just a kid? He looked like he was barely 20. She was still death gripping her FN7, unable to relax, unable to set it down. But then she had to, she had to attend to the children. Slowly she holstered the pistol and arranged her cloths so it was hidden once again. She kept looking at the body, expecting it to come back to life. Had she just killed some one?

She couldn't think about that right now. She gathered the children, still crying, and ushered them out the door and outside with the rest of the teachers and students. They were all cowering in the far corner of the parking lot unsure of what to do.

What could they do? Body armor was banned under federal law now, even though the expensive stuff could stop rifle rounds. All of them. Yet banned it is, as are many once common rifles and pistols.

And of course it’s illegal to bring any loaded gun onto school property. And that’s why she was terrified. She had broken the law. Well she had been doing it for ten years, was it ten? It would be by the end of this school year. Ten years she has carried that gun into the school, unbeknownst to any one save her husband. She did it as a matter of conscience, how could she not? No one else was even lifting a finger to provide safety to the children. All congress did was ban more weapons, ban body armor and extend the distance around schools to which it was illegal to possess a loaded firearm. None of it stopped this kid.

She had gotten her pistol before the ban, 4 years before. Thank God she did. She chose the FN7 because it was the only pistol ever offered that had the potential to penetrate regular body armor, the cheaper stuff, and nearly every school shooting that had occurred since the advent of video games involved body armor. She couldn't buy the ammo for it anymore, so the few rounds she had in the magazine and at home is all she will ever have. At least it was the good stuff, expensive, but effective. Three shots, just like she had practiced, and he was down.

She hung her head, everyone was probably assuming in shock, but she felt guilt, terrible guilt and fear. Her heart started racing again when she heard sirens. She had saved lives. Yes some students had died, none of hers though. None of hers. Yet would anyone care? Would she still go to jail? Would her daughter grow up without a mommy because she dared to do the right thing? It was a felony to have a loaded gun within a mile of the school? “A mile?” she though, trying to distract herself “A one mile zone where every one knows that no one can defend themselves  At least I proved this kids assumption wrong."

The police split, up several officers running into the school, and the others running over to the students and teachers. They did their best to calm every one down, but it was an act in futility.

It didn't take long for the officers to come walking back out of the school looking puzzled. They beckoned the other officers over, and huddled for a minute. She couldn't hear what they were saying. Her heart was pounding. Then one stepped forward and said: “The shooter is dead, looks like someone inside the class room shot him. Did anyone see what happened? We need to know where the second shooter went; he is most likely as heavily armed as this guy was. Did anyone see anything at all that they can explain clearly?

She stood there trembling, and slowly raised her hand. She did the right thing, she'll have to suffer the consequences, whatever they end up being, but she did the right thing...didn't she?

A Message for Our Time

What if there was a place where the leader of the country could have you arrested, with no evidence of any wrong doing, deny you a trial, access to a lawyer, and let you rot in prison, forgotten, until you died; would you want to live there?

What if in this same place, the police could write their own warrants to search and take from you whatever they pleased? Not only that but if you told any one, even your lawyer about the warrant, the police could arrest you, just for telling some one else, even your lawyer. Would you live there? Would you even dare visit?

What if these same police could imprison you, simply because what you claim happened and what they believe happened differ slightly? How safe would you feel on vacation there?

What if, in this hypothetical place, the leader issued orders as he pleased while the legislature was completely impotent in restricting the leader and holding him to the laws of the land? Sound like a place to risk even flying over?

What if this corrupt government was spending its country into bankruptcy? What if in that country unemployment was over 9%? On top of that the legislature and the leader made special deals for their friends in business while passing laws that hurt their competitors? Would you dare invest in any corporation within their borders?

What if this country fought endless wars, invaded small nations as it pleased, and funded terrorist organizations when they served it's purposes, all the while railing against such organizations in the state controlled press? Would you believe anything this countries government or it's media said? Would you want them to be an ally of your country?

What if this government was spying on it's citizens, and arresting some of those who speak out against these things, sending them to psych wards where they have mind destroying drugs forced upon them? Would you support political pressure from your country to get this behavior to stop?

Does this sound like a 3^rd world dictatorship? Or maybe a communist empire on the rise?

What would you do if I told you, you live here already? That everything described here is happening, right now, in the United States? Would you believe me? I hope you would because it's all very true.

We are not fighting the slow onset of tyranny or minor players in an 8 year game of change-the-leader. Tyranny is here, and we must beat it back into the pit of hell before it becomes despotic. It is not yet despotic, political strategies are still possible if the force of the people is behind them.

But it must be said, that if we lose the right to bear arms, arms of military capacity that could hold back the attempts of a military dictatorship to take root, then we will, in our lifetime see the United states decay into the turmoil and terror that is brought by such dictatorships throughout history.

Do not mistake these warnings as a call to arms, nor as a condemnation of the current regime. This is a fight for the minds of the people, and we the people are solely and completely to blame for these events. We fixed upon our shoulders the burden of governance at the founding of this nation, yet as time has passed we have cast aside this responsibility for the promise of security and free money.

Nothing is free in this world, and those who have within their grasp the ability to provide you everything can also take it away. We have done a terrible thing, generation after generation, allowing our freedoms to slowly erode, believing the lies of those in power promising us more security for every piece of freedom we relinquish.

We are solely responsible for the problems I point to in our country. If we wish to fix them we must start by blaming no one but ourselves. The key to freedom is the responsibility of the individual. The individual must take it upon himself to be as he wishes his country to be.

We have been the frog in the pot, slowly brought to boil. Each generation, slowly purged of it's freedoms in the name of safety and security. Slowly a distrust is raised among us. We want restrictions of every kind. Why? Because some one some where abused a freedom, and someone else was hurt because of it.

What fools we have been! How can we be this blind? In every group of people of any appreciable size there will be those who abuse their freedom at the expense of others. This can never be stopped, it can only be dealt with when it happens.

Yet instead of dealing with derelicts of society and moving on, we create spectacles of them. This spectacle drives up fear, fear of suffering the fate of the victim's. In our panic we lose trust of our neighbors. We demand their rights be reduced in a futile effort to protect ourselves from the scarcest of foes. All the while we are blind to the obvious reality that the reduction of my neighbors rights is a reduction of my own.

Piece by piece we demand our government take our liberties for the promise of safety, a safety that no man can ensure. Do not seek what you cannot have, and what no man can give you. Yet secure safety, not from the hazards of life, but from the greatest destroyer devised by man: government.

The blueprint to this freedom has already been created within the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States. Read these documents, and understand them. Then hold your servants in government to these laws.

And yes, they are your servants, treat them as such. The government of the United States and all it's subdivisions are representative in nature. We elect those who serve us in government. For far to long we have given them far to much leash and have been brain washed into believing that nothing will change.

Our conviction is self fulfilling. If we believe nothing will change, than it never will, for our voting will never change. And do we ever contact those we elect when matters of importance arise within their jurisdiction? Conversely, if we commit to changing the outcomes of decisions of those who we have let dominate us instead of serve us, we will have change. Not instantly, and not with grand victories. It has been a long time in heating the pot, and it will be a long time in cooling it down.

Take it upon yourself to learn what matters to you and make your public servants aware of your desires. This is how we will win, if we have the desire to do so: by each man taking the responsibility of governance upon himself.