The history and the meaning of the term "collective right" becomes murkier the harder I try to uncover it.
We know that leftists use (misuse?) "collective rights" for things like property ownership, where the collection is a group of people who share some publicly-owned property. Many have their future political interests staked on this definition, so it's important, but it doesn't make any sense to me. I ask myself: In this context, how does one exercise a "collective right"? Let's say that a group of people have the right to freedom of speech. Since the individuals make up the collection, doesn't this, in effect, grant every individual the right to speak freely? If it doesn't, then isn't that another way of saying it is an exclusive right? If only some may speak for the group, then someone is doing the choosing. At this point, it is no longer a right, and the term "exclusive right" is simply another way of saying "privilege".
I believe this ambiguity is either purposeful, or the end result of some confusion caused by coincidental (and illogical) choice of language by the fraudulent pseudo-philosophers of the socialist movement. Marx's "collective rights" can't be applied to the Second Amendment, or any individual rights in the Bill of Rights, without diminishing them. (And who would argue this point, since Marx was yet to be born when the Constitution was penned, much like the National Guard.) The exercising of my Second Amendment rights does not diminish the rights of other citizens, and any attempt to argue otherwise sounds to me a bit too much like Rousseau's General Will; calling up this fictional ghost who has the power to decide for society its conscience, with unquestionable accuracy.
The modern anti-gun movement parrots this nonsense, saying that people instead have a right to feel safe, and a government is always justified in any action it takes to accomplish this, provided that only the people of the "proper" political idealogy are in charge. Anyway, Rousseau's pseudo-philosophy leads us in circles: The freedom of man must be restrained by society, which is made up of other men. If those men are capable of properly restraining the man, why must they be restrained? Who restrains the restrainers? What a farce. Oddly enough, the Common Good is always aligned with the whims of the ideologically-correct political party. It's just a way to continue the fine traditions of dictatorship, though with justifying their decisions by seeking the advice of a population of imaginary doppelgangers, who unlike their ignorant living counterparts, always make the "morally" correct decisions.
I don't know about you, but I hate being the devil of the leftists. If I'm understanding this correctly, the concept of a "right" has been hijacked, and millions of people every year are being re-educated about it. I hope I'm wrong.
edit: removed inaccurate paragraph about historical definition of "collective right"; fixed grammar in last sentence.
