Thinking about the Bill of Rights
The brilliance of the Constitution is that it does not grant rights, but prohibits government from infringing on rights.
Two hundred and fifty years ago today, the thirteen colonies seceded from the British Empire, though it required a long and bloody war to actually secure our independence. After the war and the passage of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights was passed. What is interesting here is that the BOR does not grant rights. Instead, it restricts government from infringing on the rights the Founding Fathers assumed we had naturally.
The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law" abridging the "Five Freedoms." This is not granting rights, but limiting the authority of government to restrict rights that the Founding Fathers believed people had before the nation existed.
The Second Amendment declares "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Again this refers to what the Founding Fathers considered to be a pre-existing right, limiting the authority of government.
The Fourth Amendment forbids government from violating "The right of the people to be secure" in their papers and homes, as well as protecting other things. While some would say a right to privacy is not in the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment demonstrates otherwise. Note again that the construction of the Fourth Amendment forbids government from infringing on that right, rather than declaring a right to privacy.
The Fifth Amendment bans government from holding someone without due process, and the Sixth Amendment expands on that. Again, this is a limitation on government infringing on the rights the Founders assumed everyone had. The Seventh Amendment prohibits government from restricting "the right of trial by jury," again restricting government from infringing on rights rather than granting rights. It is interesting how four consecutive amendments specifically protect the rights of those accused of crimes. In today's populist "tough on crime" age where we sneer at people "lawyering up," we forget just how seriously the Founding Fathers took due process. This also illustrates why vigilantism is a direct attack on America itself.
(The Tenth Amendment has been dead letter for generations, but that is another topic for another day.)
All of these limitations on government power were later applied to the states in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Third Amendment is an interesting historical anomaly after the British Empire had violated the privacy and property rights of colonial families by forcibly quartering British soldiers on homes. Of course, some of those British soldiers were sexual deviants who raped women in the homes where they were quartered.
The Bill of Rights were what President Barack Obama would call "negative rights," prohibiting government from doing things to you instead of allowing government to do things for you. But the Founding Fathers, unlike politicians on both sides today, understood the danger of an overbearing government and the need to have limitations on government power in our founding documents. We need to recover that patriotic spirit for our nation's 250th birthday.