You certainly hear a lot of talk these days when it comes to democracy, and the talk implies that democracy is a good thing. Maybe you think that’s the case. Maybe you don’t, and we can get into the the the-U.S.-is-a-republic-not-a-democracy debate another time.
The fact of the matter is that most politicians and people pushing for social change argue that they have the moral high ground because they have the support of the majority of people even when that’s not true and even if, as some argue, most people are being gaslighted and manipulated in order to influence their political views.
But does the majority’s opinion matter when it comes to your rights? Put it another way, does democracy matter when it comes to a person’s rights?
The clear, rational answer is, no. Tom Knighton writes,
[Gun rights are] explicit, codified for all time in the Constitution itself.
As such, democracy becomes irrelevant, much like how we don’t decide who gets to vote based on who the majority opts to allow to vote. We don’t decide who has the right to speak freely based on whether the majority approves of that speech.
Knighton continues:
Gun rights are rights. They’re not the subject of debate, regardless of what else is going on around us. We don’t decide our rights based on the popularity of that right. If we did, they become privileges that and be yanked away at the whim of a fickle public.
Knighton is absolutely right on this. The point of a right is that it can’t (justifiably) be taken away from you no latter how unpopular it is to an easily-manipulated group of people, and we should be happy about that. Because once one right can be taken from you, then, so can the rest of them.