Beyond the rhetoric, sophistry, and pop-politics, there is the fundamental reality that we have definite rights and that these rights come with a cost. Sometimes that cost is the life of a solider on a battlefield, other times that cost is a nine year old girl who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What a curious post. It was more thought-provoking than the others in this thread so far, but also has some interesting tensions which you're either unaware of or overlooking. Please excuse the somewhat tangled analysis below - you're addressing ideas with complex underpinnings, and there's a lot of parsing to do.
First, the above quote. You make reference to sophistry and 'pop-politics' in it, and below as well, as well as 'quivering fan-boi and hater gyrations' and other colorful characterizations. Are you saying you see that in this thread? Otherwise, what's the relevance? Tossing out labels without clear meanings doesn't advance debate, and is, ironically, a trademark of those political games. If you want to avoid falling into the easy trap of emulating the political babble so many of us (including yourself) are so tired of, take care to describe, rather than to label. That, the tension between your stated dislike of jingoism and your flirtation with it, is the first of the tensions that struck me. To be clear, I'm not chastising you - it's an easy trap to fall into, and I sometimes do it myself, but label-tossing isn't particularly useful or constructive.
The second tension is also in evidence above. You immediately make reference to 'definite rights' (and later natural rites and legal positivism), and note that those rights 'come with a cost.' Those two concepts, natural rights and cost, are at loggerheads with each other. The Lockian/liberal enlightenment concept of natural rights, on which our founders based much of our Constitution (and which many other constitutions emulating it have enshrined), is deontological in nature. That is to say, it lays claim to rights arising out of nature - rights by virtue of their nature, and NOT by virtue of the consequences of those rights. Considerations of cost, by contrast, are the exact opposite of this - they are utilitarian calculus, which assigns morality (and, consequently, rights) by virtue of their consequences, not by dint of natural character of the right. Bearing that in mind, let's continue to the next section of your post:
To the extent that you're suggesting we disregard costs and look only at principle, you're espousing a natural rights view - that's my overall reading of your post, please correct me if that wasn't your meaning. If that's the case, there's no reason to mention that rights come with a cost, as you start out your post by doing. You are instead making a deontological, not a utilitarian, argument for rights, and costs are a non-issue, so I'm left a little bit puzzled. My best guess is that you were again dipping into the trough of jingoism, unintentionally - there are, after all, few things more license-plate 'pop-politic' jingoistic than 'freedom isn't free' (to paraphrase your leading line). For the record, I completely agree, as I noted above - rights come with costs. It just seems quixotic to point that out and then argue we should completely disregard those costs and instead focus on principles (I, by contrast, was arguing that we should focus on consequences).
Now, on to the next bit, about 'honest' arguments being based on principle rather than cost analysis. I would be somewhat offended by that if I thought you'd thought it through. There is absolutely nothing dishonest about cost-benefit public policy analysis. In fact, it's a good deal MORE honest than most deontological principle-based arguments, because arguments of that kind are extremely easy to manipulate. They dwell in the all-or-nothing dichotomous logic I'm so fond of bemoaning. But, before I can elaborate on that very tangled mass of ideas, I need to elaborate on the relationship of deontological and utilitarian approaches to morality.
Specifically, neither camp is completely correct. Both ethical systems run into jarring scenarios that conflict with our ethical instincts. Deontologists would argue that the act of killing is always wrong. In the extreme, that would mean even killing when the consequence is saving your own life, is wrong (though some argue less convincingly that the act of self-defense is distinct). It would also mean that it would be wrong to travel back in time to kill Hitler before he caused the Holocaust, to use another popular example. 1 life or 6 million, it doesn't matter. Utilitarianism, by contrast, handles that scenario very well, playing to our instinct that sometimes, consequences DO matter - self-defense matters, and sacrificing oneself to save a number of others, is also seen as noble (think a soldier jumping on a grenade to protect his friends). It also runs into trouble, however, where our instincts tell us that some things are sacrosanct - for example, it would hold that it would be moral to kill one patient to save x number of others (the x can vary). Of course, utilitarians would argue, also less convincingly, that secondary consequences (people not using hospitals for fear of being 'donated') would weigh against to the point where that wouldn't be moral. Still, though, utilitarianism fails to capture our sense of the sacrosanct, just as deontology fails to capture our sense that consequences matter. As always, the truth lies somewhere between. The point of all this? Neither camp is totally correct, and neither is more 'honest' than the other.
Before I delve into an explanation of why cost-analysis is better, let's get this out of the way:
Two quick notes. First, lumping OLbermanN in there with those other clowns is a mistake. He's a bit of a blowhard at times, true, and he apparently is rocking a serious ego away from the cameras, but he, unlike all those others, is generally fact-based and attempts a fair analysis. If you wanted another liberal pick, you should've gone with Ed Schultz. He even has the same moronic viewer polls as Fox where 95% of the audience mysteriously picks the right answer to the loaded question.
Second, I too have become quite jaded to much of this country's political discourse as well. I'm wary of that, however, since decreasing voter turnout is one of the major goals of the very wealthy in this country, and jading voters is a great way to do it. I'll save the history of civilization as class warfare lecture for another post.
I would also caution against not taking that kind of bloviation seriously. In a country where education is on the decline, and has been for some time, lies repeated gain even more power than they would otherwise. Critical thinking is an ability in seriously short supply.
Now, on to the meat of the matter:
Time to dump some free legal education on you. First, though, some more philosophy as foundation. Natural law rights are FAR rarer than natural rights theorists would have you believe. More glibly, Hobbes was right, Locke was wrong. In nature, we have as our own rights only our own cognition and our own volition. Basically, we are bounded by our natures to only a very narrow set of rights. Everything else has been tacked on since, in the evolution of society, which has played out the contest between individual and society again and again. As our understanding of consequences has grown, so too has our understanding of the relationship to individual and society. Because we don't want to bear the risk of having our life, liberty, or property taken at the whim of another, for example, we agree not to take the same FROM others. It is, as Rousseau called it, a social contract, and yes, it grows out of natural laws, but it is, by and large, based on utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis, and the final denominator is always threat of force. Because I'm a huge fan, I'll quote a bit of Hobbes (who, by the way, when I first studied him, I hated):
"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Now, the legal bit. I'm taking what would be considered in philosophical circles as a fairly robust stance on what is still a hotly debated topic on the nature of morality (and the rights which descend from it). I used to be FAR less sanguine about my views on the subject. Now, however, I've seen it in practice. Legal battles are, fundamentally, about assignments of rights. Often times, those rights will not have been assigned yet, and new rights appear as our society and its technology advances. They are fundamentally NOT 'natural' rights - they aren't rights at all until a piece of legislation or a court holding assigns them. This assignment of rights is a centerpiece of our legal and economic system - without it, inefficiency inevitably results, in what Hardin famously termed the tragedy of the commons (in a phrase, unassigned property rights are conducive to waste, typically via overuse).
Of course, all of that likely sounds a little airy to a layman, so I'll offer a concrete example - pollution. Before the industrial revolution, there was no right to pollute, NOR an opposing right to clean air and water, because the issue simply hadn't arisen - there was no contested property to divide by means of rights assignment. Now, however, those assignments have been made, and those 'rights' exist. They arose not because they are 'natural', but out of litigation, and trial and error, based on analysis of the consequences of this rule or that. The same holds for our other laws, as well, be it contract, tort, securities regulation, or election law. We have myriad rights, but they arose from an ever-evolving understanding of cost and benefit. They have evolved to the point that they look at long-term as well as short-term consequences, in fact, which is something those politicos you loathe often rely on, in challenging them based on 'common sense', which seldom looks beyond the nose of the thinker, let alone at long-term societal consequences. In fact, our entire legal system is premised on the very cost-benefit analysis you want to toss aside in favor of debating abstract principle.
That reliance on abstract principal has, ironically, been growing increasingly popular in mainstream politics, because it is so useful for obfuscating facts damaging to one side's position. We can, for example, decry a common-sense gun regulation as a violation of the right to bear arms, and stifle debate of pros and cons before it begins. But, you quite rightly object, what is the law, other than a series of principles? Well, you're right. The problem is, that to codify all our moral intuitions about the 'right' outcome into a set of principles, would require an absurdly complex system of laws, which would be far too complex in practice (we require, for example, fair notice in our criminal code - ignorance of the law is no defense, therefore the law cannot be so convoluted as to escape easy understanding). To solve this dilemma, our law leaves room for interpretation, in order to capture efficient (read: moral) outcomes.
There is a similar relation between efficient outcomes when it comes to policy debates. Pareto-efficient policymaking requires complex decision-making, which does NOT sell well in the political arena. Politicians are thereby larded with an excellent incentive to oversimplify, relying on simple principles, like the 2nd amendment. Such principles don't stand up to individual scrutiny in the abstract, because they are, in practice, fitted in with a host of other, competing principles, in a complex web of law. If you want to take yourself seriously as an intellectually honest, ethical adult, as you say, it is PRECISELY to the this complex interaction of principles, this system of laws based on careful analysis of cause and effect, to which you must set yourself. Discussions of abstract principles will, by their very nature, fail to capture truth about efficient outcomes.
Since I already made my case against this line of thinking above, I'll leave you to ponder it in the light of the rest of this response, instead of reiterating it.
Funky