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"People also have a right to walk down the street without being killed or mugged," he said at a news conference.
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No, Sir, there is no such right. The right that exists - or at least should exist in form of a law - is that people have the freedom to defend themselves against a killer or mugger, and to resist to getting killed or mugged.
A small but very important difference with significant consequences.
That right is a natural right, turning it into a law is a mere formality.
Why is this important? It is important because human rights and the likes often are misunderstood to be something of non-material, idealized format. That way, they remain vague, sometimes self-contradictory, and can even assist in damaging the cause they claim to stand up for. But truth is: such rights - human rights - and all other rights in the end can only be clearly understood and precisely defined if seeing them as property rights.
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Originally Posted by The Ethics of Freedom, chapter 15 (M. Rothbard)
Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of "rights" for such
"human" rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to
private property.' And yet, on the contrary the concept of "rights"
only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human
rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their
absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property
rights are not used as the standard.
In the first place, there are two senses in which property rights are
identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans,
so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings;
and two, that the person's right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a
property right in his own person as well as a "human right." But more
importantly for our discussion, human rights, when not put in terms of
property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory, causing liberals
to weaken those rights on behalf of "public policy" or the "public good."
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