When our Founding Fathers penned the Bill of Rights, they didn’t intend for them to be all-encompassing. Instead, they preserved a handful of key rights with the belief that those would preserve the rest.

However, it seems many people don’t seem to understand much about rights.

Take this letter to the editor:

Regarding the Nov. 19 article on ”Kyle Rittenhouse found not guilty of all charges,” I strongly disagree with this acquittal, as I firmly believe that when you bring a gun into a public space, then it means you intend to commit premeditated murder.

I am so tired of gun owners claiming they have infinite rights, and it is time to infringe on their rights. Owning a gun is not a part of your body like in reproductive rights, sexual orientation, gender identity, skin color, ethnicity, age, or disability, and therefore does not deserve the same legal protections. I agree with former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who said we need to repeal the Second Amendment so we can enact more gun-control laws and sue gun sellers and manufacturers. Holding gun owners accountable begins with barring anyone under the age of 21 from accessing a gun, just like we bar those under 21 from purchasing alcohol.

Wow.

I notice the author is very into the idea of things that make up an individual, things like reproduction, sexual orientation, gender identity, and so on. It’s funny that the letter writer would value these things, believing them worth certain legal protections, all while believing that the individual’s right to protect themself isn’t nearly as important.

The author, a woman, is very much against the idea of privately-owned firearms and believes that gun owners somehow need to be held accountable for the actions of others, even though we haven’t done anything wrong. This is collective punishment, in essence, where you punish an individual for the actions of another.

Communists and other totalitarian regimes are really big on this sort of thing.

Here in the United States, we’re not. Take Loudon County, Virginia, for example. The schools are at the heart of a firestorm because of a sexual assault case. In that case, a transgender female teen sexually assaulted a female student. If we were to apply the author’s “logic” across the board, we’d punish other transgender students for the actions of this one. We’d treat all of them with the same level of suspicion as we would this student.

I somehow doubt she actually would want that.

See, what she doesn’t understand about rights is that they apply equally and any infringement on one right is used to justify infringement on another. If you start treating all gun owners as if they’re criminals, then don’t be surprised when other groups begin to be treated as if they’re all criminals as well.

Of course, the author would object to that. She’d claim that guns are different, that they’re dangerous, but dangerous is relative. Ideas like communism have killed over 100 million people throughout the 20th century. Accidental shootings by firearms don’t even make up a fraction as much over that same timespan. Hell, even the American murder rate pales by comparison. Is communism so dangerous that free speech should be restricted so as to stop the spread?

She’d likely say no, but that’s just the point. Gun rights are no different than any other rights. She can agree with a former Supreme Court justice if she wants, but invoking his name as if that lends any gravitas to her argument ignores that the Second Amendment is part of our Constitution and unless she thinks she can rally two-thirds of the states to her away of thinking, she might as well just grow up.