CARY - USA Today recently asked readers: "Does the Second Amendment give us the right to bear arms?" There was an overwhelming "yes" response (98 percent). But they got it wrong.

The second of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, doesn't give us a thing. It protects a right we already have, inherent in our being.

Both conservatives (who should know better) and liberals (who should know better) frequently protest infringements on "constitutional rights." But there's no such thing. Our nation's founders recognized only natural rights when they proclaimed "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ...."

In other words, rights do not come from the Constitution, or government or the state. They are yours because you exist.

Early Americans insisted on a Bill of Rights to limit the power of government and to protect the rights of the people, as a condition for ratifying the Constitution. The purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was to set up a government with specific and enumerated powers for the purpose of protecting life, liberty and property -- not to establish a centralized state that meddles in every niche of our lives.

The Bill of Rights guarantees the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion; protections against unreasonable searches and coerced confessions; rights to counsel and a jury trial. It stands between tyranny and liberty.

Or at least it did before 9/11.

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TODAY, THE BILL OF RIGHTS IS UNDER ATTACK, not from terrorists but from possibly well-meaning but certainly misguided politicians who want to protect our liberty by denying it.

Benjamin Franklin's warning that they who "give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" is cynically dismissed with the quip "The Constitution is not a suicide pact."

Thomas Jefferson predicted this. He observed that it was natural "for liberty to yield and government to gain ground" and warned of the "dangerous delusion" of allowing confidence in our leaders to "silence our fears for the safety of our rights." The Constitution and Bill of Rights "fixed the limits ... to which our confidence may go ...," he said. "In questions of power, then," Jefferson said, "let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

That's why we should celebrate the Bill of Rights this year more than ever. The Constitution is, after all, what America's military men and women pledge their lives to defend. The Bill of Rights is uniquely American, something conservatives, moderates and liberals -- and especially Libertarians -- can all rally around, because it expresses our shared basic values.

We should celebrate tomorrow, Dec. 15 (the day the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791), as Bill of Rights Day. Fly the flag, put up a poster, and most important of all, read the Bill of Rights. And read it to your children.

(Brian Irving is communications director for the Libertarian Party of North Carolina. He is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and lives in Cary.)