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Insight from Canada

EnterStageRight has it.

"Security of the person is non-negotiable. It is the prime given. It is the excuse government uses for nearly all its other actions. The thing about security of the person is that it is ultimately not something that can be delegated. Anyone who demands under any circumstances that a person delegate that authority 100% by disarming whether voluntarily or under duress is either running a protection racket or planning something very, very bad. Maybe even Pol Pot bad."

An interesting adaptation of Hobbes, who, nearly four centuries ago, originated the concept of "inalienable rights." Hobbes argued that men instituted government for group protection, to end the state of nature where every person had to protect themselves (and were in turn free to attack and rob others, subject only to the risk that the person might defend and kill them). His Levithan managed to annoy almost everyone. Royalists were angered that he found the source of sovereignty in popular will rather than divine right. Republicans were angered that he considered the delegation of power to the government (in his time, most likely a king) irrevokable.

Hobbes considered that the people might give up just about any right (starting with the "right" to victimize others by crime) EXCEPT self-defense. Why? Because they had empowered the government precisely to protect them and make self-defense unnecessary. Anytime it was necessary, the government had failed in its central purpose. The one right remaining, of protection, could not be bargained away, because it was the only thing the subject had received in exchange for making the deal. Thus a subject could not alienate, voluntarily bargain away that right, no matter what the government offered in return and no matter how much he wanted to.

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