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One of the most often-abused terms in our language, legal or otherwise, is the concept of a "right." Many people confuse a right with a whim, or an "is" with an "ought." Before anyone can ask whether anything is a "personal right" (as if there were any other kind!), one must make sure that they recognize what a right is, and what a right is not.

Simply put, a right is a thing to which you are entitled, but places no burden or obligation upon others. To use the only rights known to man, let's look at the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This phrase is written the way it is for a reason. The right to life puts no obligation on anyone to sustain that life, it only guarantees that no one has any right to take it. The right to liberty is what it sounds like: that you should be free from coercive force. The right to pursue happiness is exactly that, as well: the right to PURSUE happiness - no one is obligated to find your happiness, it must be found and earned by your own hand.

Think of rights this way: if you are alone on a deserted island only 5-feet wide, all of your rights remain intact, despite the fact that there are no others with you: you can engage in any kind of perverse behaviour or neurosis you desire, and it would be well within your rights - and there is no one else around to provide you with the "rights" of a job, or shelter, or food. You must find a way to sustain your own life, without recourse of relying on another, either through their pity or your theft of their property.

All other rights are simply corollaries. The "right to bear arms" should have been obvious in the right to liberty: the right to own a weapon is the right to own a means of self-defense; my ability to purchase and own a gun does not put any obligation onto anyone to provide me with neither gun nor ammunition, nor does it hinder anyone else's rights: the ownership of a gun does not give me any power for aggression. It is only when I point the gun toward another man and attempt to extract some kind of service or good under threat of violence does the concept of a gun become synonymous with the concept of a violation of another's rights.

The right to privacy is simply an extension of property rights, which is another term for the right to life. Property rights flow naturally out of the concept that a man (note: "man" here also refers to "woman;" for the sake of my prose I will be using "man" to refer to all people, avoiding the delightfully awkward "he/she") owns

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