Silliness continues at the UN. If I wasn’t so cynical, I’d say that this is trying to overrule our 2nd Amendment, eh?
Glen Reynolds at Instapundit has this link to a blog that is new to me, Arms and the Law.
The story – "UN report proclaims self-defense is not a right" [note- I have broken it up into smaller chunks – it is late as I do this commenting (not that much is needed) and my brain is not parsing easily – apologies to the author].
A report (pdf format) submitted by Barbara Frey, Special Rapporteur, whatever that is, to the UN Human Rights Councils’s Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, whatever that is.
They have more titles and longer words to describe them, than I have ever seen. Ever think that the wordiness is either proportional to the hilarity they create or inversely proportional to the wisdom they bring to the job?
Re-reading it, I think the point is that the Special Rapper wants to class self-defense as something less than a "right" (i.e., as a manner of criminal defense) because if it were recognized as a "right" it would be something governments would be bound to guarantee — and that leads right to Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynold’s argument that a right to arms should be guaranteed as an international right.
How could governments "guarantee" such a right (in the sense of doing something more than saying "you can plead this as a defense if prosecuted" — as might be expected the UN document treats "rights" as something more than "the government must leave you alone" — while outlawing the items a person needs to exercise that right?
Good point – if you can defend yourself, shouldn’t you be allowed the means to do so? After all, the police can’t be everywhere? And it can take time to get to where the crime / assault is happening, thus you can be dead by the time they arrive.
Sadly, I see signs that if you try to keep from being beaten to a pulp in some states and in some countries (e.g., UK), you are in the wrong.
This leads to the anomaly that the report claims that the right to life is a "right," but the right to keep from having your life taken is not. I suppose it equates to — you have a "right," however unenforcable, to be protected by government, but not to defend yourself if it fails to do so.
I hate to muddy the waters, but if you have a right to life, does this mean that the UN is against abortion (uh-oh….it must really be getting late for me to even think this way)?
As might be expected from the source, the concept of "right" is rather ineptly socialist: rights are what you may ask the government to do for you. (And of course strongly of the legal positivist school: rights are not something that pre-exist government, and any official declaration of them, derived from a deity, morality, or man’s nature. Rather, in this view they are created by the document, or government, that acts to write them down. Created, as opposed to guaranteed).
Sadly, that is what the West keeps lurching towards. As opposed to our Declaration or Constitution where our rights are specifically spelled out as being from God (the Creator), many politicians do see rights as being issued from Government or the State.
And what is given by the State can be taken away by the State.
Hey, who wants to teach me to shoot!
