> Inalienable rights preceed government, they are not granted by it.
That's a nice ideal, but in reality governments can do and take away whatever they want, and a guarantee that they won't take away your "inalienable" rights is only as good as the system built around that government, and the willingness of its people to fight (physically or legally) for their rights.
Too true. The real problem here, in my humble opinion, is that the mechanism by which the citizens of the United States can fundamentally alter the government (via constitutional amendment) require sizable majorities and broad consensus (I realize that this is primarily a feature), while the mechanism by which the the United States government can alter fundamentally alter itself (via the extra-constitutional mechanism we call Judicial Review) requires a simple majority of 5/9 unelected "justices". We've seen this mechanism, over the course of ~230 years, bootstrap a pathetically weak federal government into a unitary behemoth which dominates our state and local governments. And the only way to get off the train is violent revolution! It's like a bad joke.
We need to acknowledge that human beings have a right to self-governance, that this includes the right to form new governments via democratic referenda, and that governments that prevent this are engaged in something which, upon inspection, cannot be distinguished from imperialism.
The right to freedom of speech in the US is almost truly uninhibited. Even the "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" argument was actually revisited by the Supreme Court and thrown out.
If there's an amendment to the constitution to ban owning a firearm, so be it. But if that right is severely limited without an amendment, it would be natural to fear for the rest. The verbiage on the first 10 amendments is incredibly simple. "shall not be infringed".
There is often a disconnect between what is the constitution/the law, and what the people in power actually order their cops/soldiers to do.
The constitution of the USSR guaranteed the privacy of citizens' communications, freedom of religion, and doesn't just allow citizens to criticize public organizations but prohibits persecution of critics. You know what happened in reality.
The US is by no means immune to that - we've seen last year that the President can easily send some of the millions of armed people he has under his direct control to crack down on protests and disappear some people -- while the constitutional legitimacy gets debated months later once the damage is done...
That's a nice ideal, but in reality governments can do and take away whatever they want, and a guarantee that they won't take away your "inalienable" rights is only as good as the system built around that government, and the willingness of its people to fight (physically or legally) for their rights.