Wayne LaPierre is rarely accused of progressivism. But when Mr. LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association, addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, he invoked the Second Amendment in much the same way that a significant portion of the left has long spoken of the rights it values. According to this conception, rights are zones of personal autonomy where the individual owes no explanation and the community has no jurisdiction. This manner of thinking about rights is a serious barrier to reasonable regulations of firearms. The N.R.A. ritually claims the mantle of the Constitution, but the American founders who framed it had a far richer view in which individual rights were subject to considerations of the common good.

There may be good reasons not to regulate firearms further, but the individual’s absolute claim that his or her guns are nobody’s business is not one of them. To even make this assertion is an illustration of what the legal scholar and diplomat Mary Ann Glendon calls “the illusion of absoluteness,” an idea that is hostile to the possibility of political community. All rights have limits. The question is who determines them. For the framers of the Constitution, the answer was that the people do.

One of the earliest American assertions of rights, the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties, delineated rights against everything from banishment to dismemberment but subjected them to regulation by the legislature. The community could take these actions only according to rules known in advance and equally applicable to all. The essence of rights in this early understanding was the rule of law — as propounded by the community — not the isolation of the individual.

The Declaration of Independence, whose “unalienable rights” individualists are so quick to claim for themselves, dealt with rights similarly. In legal parlance, to “alienate” something is to exchange it for an equivalent — precisely what individuals do with their rights when they form a political community. The Declaration’s rights are coherently “unalienable” only if they are possessed by what the document calls “one people.” This interpretation is backed by the fact that many of the complaints against King George that the document proceeds to enumerate are not that he did something absolutely forbidden but rather that he did so without the legislature’s consent.