Vampires and Guns

Okay, so Anne Rice has apparently been holed up overlooking the Pacific Ocean writing a book about Jesus. I eagerly await the next volume of the series when the baby Jesus battles vampires for the soul of humanity. Perhaps she wouldn’t consider that to be "for the Lord", so maybe the plot will vary slightly from my synopsis. We’ll have to wait and see. I confess I’m baffled. I’ll just do what I always do, which is to take her newfound religiosity on face value for the time being. If I were a cynical old curmudgeon, I might think that the sales on the vampire stuff have been steadily declining over the years and she needed a new shtick to prop up sales numbers. However, that would be ungracious of me. I’ll leave it to the rest of the world to reconcile the vampire goth-porn godmother with the biographer of Jesus, since they are now one and the same.

In other completely unrelated news, Brazil kicked an anti-gun referendum to the curb. The attempted ban was notable mainly because it got slapped down 64% to 35%. That’s a pretty staggering defeat in a democracy. The Fox article quotes some asshat from California thusly:

"Now, a lot of Brazilians are insisting on their right to bear arms, they don't even have a pseudo right to bear arms. It's not in their Constitution."

I shouldn’t be appalled at this basic misunderstanding of how rights work from a resident of our largest and silliest state, but it’s still annoying. Americans, above all others, should understand how rights work. A constitution only codifies rights, it does not grant them. Rights are, to borrow a word, inalienable. Governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. Does this ring a bell with anyone? Have you heard this somewhere before? If you missed this basic point in civics class all those years ago, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to convince the rest of the world what rights they should or shouldn’t have.

Dave Kopel has more thoughts on the Brazil issue, as does GWA.45.