I just wanna circle back real quick to note two things -- first, I'm stupid, and it's the fourteenth amendment that protected voting rights for all (male) citizens regardless of race, not the thirteenth, my bad (but some of yours too, we must be equally stupid).

The other thing I wanted to point out is that this concept I've been talking about -- where your rights exist already, and the law simply protects (or fails to protect) them -- that's not something I just made up. That's the way the Constitution is written. It's not so much "my take" on things, that's the actual extant law of the United States. The law doesn't say "You're allowed to have guns," the law says "[b]the right of the people to keep and bear arms [u]shall not be infringed.[/u][/b]" 

....except when it's [i]not[/i] written that way, which is something I didn't realize (because clearly I don't study the constitution enough) until I looked it up to prove my point. Take the "Miranda" rights, for example -- there's a significant technical difference between the fourth amendment ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated") and the sixth (it's long, google it). The fourth considers security a basic human right, where the sixth extends a legal privilege to citizens. [i]Wildly different concepts.[/i] We refer to both as "rights" in regular humanspeak, but those are different things.

Which brings me to this -- I'm definitely right about [i]certain[/i] constitutional rights, but I'm also definitely [i]wrong[/i] and [b]you folks[/b] are right about [i]other[/i] constitutional rights. According to what the actual law actually is, anyway, we can argue philosophically about that, but the constitution itself (and its amendments), pretty black-and-white.