This is the Stephen Miller caveman view of the world, but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. It's a very straightforward consequence of refusing to ever admit you are wrong. "If I did it, then I must have had the right to do it."

It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.

> Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have.

Plenty folks of didn't / don't change their minds about what rights they thought they had/have, even in the face of guns. Just look at what's currently going in Iran.

If you're in the US, and believe in your own Constitution, then people have "unalienable Rights" that are "endowed by their Creator", regardless of whether they are recognized by the government or not:

* https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...

You're conflating rights with freedoms, which is the same category error as confusing legality with morality.

Your rights are, by their nature inalienable. They are recognized (or not) by individual power structures, granting you freedoms.

Under an authoritarian regime, your freedoms maybe be limited, for example, your right to free speech may be curtailed by men with guns. Killing those men is illegal, but not unethical, exactly because they are infringing your rights.

This all may seem academic to the person with a boot on their throat, but it dictates how outsiders view one's actions.

> If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.

My sister is wheelchair bound with MS. Half the time she can barely see. You can give her all the guns you want and she isn't going be to able to defend herself. I reject your nonsense assertion that because of this she has no rights.

race to the bottom logic

this kind of logic will always lead to everyone losing in the long run. always. there will always be a more powerful bully that steps up to take over. history is very clear on this one.

Ok. So a man with a gun has the right to shoot you and kill you. Then a policeman comes with a bigger gun and he has the right to kidnap the murderer. Then comes a judge with an even bigger gun (the law) and has the right to lock him up in a prison. But then the murderer gets hold of a weapon and he has the right to escape from prison. Etc.

You see that this view doesn't go very far.

Might can defend, or violate, rights, but it does not make them.

How are all those guns helping in the US right now, as it turns authoritarian?

You can go back to the ancient Greeks to explain what is wrong about that.

Literally two thousand years of civilization were spent on combating the pockets in which people live by that principle.