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Everyday it seems our rights are trampled and chipped away under the banner of "For our Protection," but what does it mean to have rights? Often the definition of "rights" seem interpreted as "privileges" to be earned or lost based on our collective behavior. There is a sentiment that the Constitution gave us our rights, which suggests that they would vanish without it. The Constitution, however, guarantees our rights, which exist independent of the document.

Our rights belong to us, not as a collective, ruled by a governing body, but as individuals. Each person is an independent entity and we are entitled to our rights by virtue of birth and the ability to be self-aware. Our nation is referred to as the United States of America, but it is really the People of these United States. We don't belong to the states, or to the government, they belong to us.

For any governing body to remove or infringe our rights is to violate each individual. Murder is illegal because it violates the rights of individuals, not because it offends the collective nation. Because we are unequal in our lives, but equal in life (life being the only common denominator), retribution for violating another person's life, or rights, must take the form of having one's rights violated in return. That is the basis of law. Any law that does not specifically protect the rights of the individual, not the collective people, but the individual people that hold the rights, is an unjust law. The law was created as a means of peaceful retribution, not as containment. Owning a gun does not violate anyone's rights. Shooting someone with it does. Driving a car does not violate anyone's rights, running someone down with it does.

We cannot afford to pick and choose for others which rights we can live with and live without. You need not exercise every right you have, but you must never toss any of them aside. Every freedom we concede makes us less individual. We become subservient to the collective body, the child of our child. A government is our own abstract creation, we must rule it, or be ruled by it.

We must be the vigilant parents that watch over our governing body and not surrender our rights and freedoms to that governing body. To allow this is to leave us at the mercy of others and we are no longer free. To say we must sacrifice this right or that freedom in the name of security is to place our security in the hands of others, which makes us neither free nor safe.

Empires crumble and nations die and all that binds this nation together is the higher ideal that it represents: That every human is born with the inalienable right of self-determination and free will. Without these, we may as well return to kings and slavery.

Learn more about this author, Jason Billingsley.
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