The recent United States Supreme Court decisions in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. resulted in a leftist tidal wave of histrionic personality disorder coupled with (mostly violent) demonstrations. An aristocracy of celebrities and opinion pundits all appear to be auditioning daily for roles in a reality television show that could be named “Biggest Leftist Virtue Signalers.” Their level of shallow knowledge and hyperventilating rhetoric would make a junior high school debating club blush. Not to be outdone, MSNBC’s own court jester Elie Mystal proved to the world that his bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard University were wasted on him. Appearing on Joy Reid’s ReidOut television show, Mr. Mystal proclaimed that “if you want rights in this country under this conservative Supreme Court, you’d better be a cis hetero white man or an Uzi. Because those are the two things that this court believes have rights.” (https://tinyurl.com/4wjwt22k). Alan Dershowitz, Mr. Mystal’s professor at Harvard Law School, should make Mr. Mystal retake his Constitutional Law class.

To be informed citizens, Americans must first understand what rights mean. It is not necessary, though, for them to read Prof. Ronald Dworkin’s masterpieces, Taking Rights Seriously (1977) and Law’s Empire (1986). Stated succinctly, a right is a prohibition against a government from doing something to a person.

Rights are fundamental in a republic. It must be recalled that the United States is a constitutional republic and not a democracy, which is an important distinction. In a democracy, there are no individual rights. The majority in a democracy always wins because the utilitarian benefit to the many always outweighs the interests of the few or the individual. It is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for dinner, and the lamb always loses. In contrast, the lamb’s right to keep its own life in a republic always prevails over the wolves’ interest in lamb chops.

Rights are not gifts to the people from their earthly monarchs or governments. They belong to the people by natural law, given to them by God or by Mother Nature, by virtue of being human beings. Many of these natural rights are described in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution, whereas the remainder are alluded to in the Ninth Amendment. Rights are things that one already has that government must not take away without due process of law. A girl does not have a right to a pony that the government must provide to her at the taxpayers’ expense. But if she already owns a pony, she has a right not to have the government take it away from her.

Another point to remember is that rights are restraints and prohibitions only against the powers of governmental bodies, not against other individuals or groups. A child does not have an Eighth Amendment right against “cruel and unusual punishment” to forbid his parents from sending him to his room. Neither does a teenager have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or a Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel when dealing with her parents. The First Amendment does not require me, as a private person, to provide people with statist and collectivist viewpoints with a forum in my house for spouting their absurd beliefs. Satanists may have a First Amendment right to assemble and practice their religion, but not under my own roof. But when predatory people victimize other people’s lives, liberties, and properties, these are not constitutional violations, but crimes, as defined by the laws of the states where they live.

So, is Mr. Mystal right that women and minorities really have fewer rights than an Uzi? Not by a long shot. Women and minorities are human beings and have natural and constitutional rights against governments. Uzis are inanimate objects that belong to people, and, despite aspirational Disney movies to the contrary, these inanimate objects have no consciousness, willpower, independent locomotion, thinking faculties, or any rights whatsoever. Rather, the Second Amendment recognizes the natural right of American citizens to (use weapons to) defend themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their nation against deadly attacks from foreign enemies, domestic criminals, and their governments, should the latter be ruled by tyrants like English King George III.

Contrary to Mr. Mystal, the Second Amendment does not discriminate between cis hetero-white males and other Americans. The Second Amendment prohibits the federal government and the various states from preventing human beings of all races, national origins, religious beliefs, genders, and sexual orientations from defending themselves. The irony is that the vast majority of the gun control laws relied upon by the dissenting justices in Bruen as precedents to disarm Americans were originally enacted by southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War to disarm the newly-freed African-American slaves to make them easy prey for the Ku Klux Klan. Contemporary leftists want to use the same post Civil War laws as stepping stones for enacting new gun control laws and even repeal outright the Second Amendment so that there can be no armed resistance to governments implementing radical social engineering diktats demanded by virtue-signaling celebrities, myopic academicians, and purple-haired shrieking activists with histrionic personality disorders.

There is a big distinction and difference between the right to keep and bear arms and abortion. The Supreme Court ruled in Bruen in favor of American citizens and against the State of New York because the right to keep and bear arms is a clear constitutional right that is explicitly written in the Bill of Rights. In contrast, the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs in favor of the State of Mississippi because abortion is not mentioned at all in the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court reversed its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that discovered an unwritten right to an abortion because the Bill of Rights is completely silent on this issue, and, therefore, the Tenth Amendment permits each state to regulate it as it sees fit.

The left hates both Bruen and Dobbs because it lusts for ultimate government power to regulate every aspect of life, preferably at the federal level, uniformly throughout the United States (next stop, the world under the U.N.), regardless of what the Constitution actually states. If the left likes something like abortion, it believes federal law should mandate and fund it with federal taxes. If the left hates something like firearms in the hands of the so-called bitter people who cling to guns or religion, then it believes that federal law should outlaw it and federal agencies should enforce the prohibitions, again with funding through federal taxes. But, if federal law is unavailable, the left will be temporarily mollified with state laws prohibiting firearms—provided the states are enlightened coastal states like New York and California, not flyover states populated by bitter clingers and deplorables—and funded by federal taxes funneled to states as block grants. Supreme Court decisions that reduce federal powers by recognizing individual rights or allowing states to regulate themselves under the Tenth Amendment are anathema to the left, which explains leftist panic theater and mass histrionics.