Robin West

These new rights — a right to lethal self defense and to own the means to carry it out, a right not to buy insurance where doing so would resolve a collective health care crisis and a right to “home school” free of all state regulation — collectively suggest the imagining of a new rights paradigm. They are not just liberal rights of self-expression. They are radically and, I believe, deeply tragic anti-collectivist rights to exit core parts of the civic compact, usually by inactivity — not buying insurance, not sending one’s children to school, not surrendering the means of one’s own self protection to a police force — that undermines, sometimes near fatally, the civic attempt to solve collective problems collectively through the project of government. The children in public schools suffer when the parents of over two million children claim a right to “homeschool,” thereby justifying diminished resources for education and sacrificing parental and communal good will. All of us, including the police, are endangered by the proliferation of weaponry among citizens when half the country is armed. And the insured, as well as uninsured, are impoverished by the refusal of the healthy to participate in an insurance mandate that would reduce costs for all.