Will the Second Amendment survive?

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Radar

Nature doesn't "enforce" the law of gravity.

Yes it does. Anything that gravity prohibits can't be done. Rights prohibit nothing in the absence of human enforcement.

Our rights have nothing to do with perception.

If you attempt to do something without taking gravity into account, the punishment is failure.
If you attempt to do something without taking rights into account, the punishment is decided by yourself, in the form of guilt, and/or by the reactions of others, all of which are based entirely on perception.

Society is made up of individuals. If individuals do not have rights, where does society gain its powers from? By what authority does "society" act? How can "society" grant rights to people when the people who make up society have no rights?

This post is made up of sentences, each of which is made up of words, each of which is made up of letters. A letter doesn't have all of the properties of the post.

Again, I am not saying that we don't have rights, or that it's a bad idea to behave as if we do. What I am saying is that your assertions that rights have physical, objective reality outside the mind are unsupported. I suspect it is because they are unsupportable; not because they are false, but because the question of their validity is untestable.

[Radar]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Yes it does. Anything that gravity prohibits can't be done. Rights prohibit nothing in the absence of human enforcement.

To enforce something is to use force. Since gravity IS a force, nature does not need to enforce it. Not being able to do something because gravity exists, is not enforcing gravity.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Radar

To enforce something is to use force. Since gravity IS a force, nature does not need to enforce it. Not being able to do something because gravity exists, is not enforcing gravity.

Semantics. The fact remains that you can't ignore gravity, you can only work within it. You can completely ignore rights, and the only results will be based on human perception.