Natural Right

If you were a Briton in a village by the sea when the Saxons came to loot and burn your village, you would have a right to resist the looting and burning of your home even if you weren't a soldier. If you were, later, a Saxon on the same shore when the Vikings came to loot and burn your home, you would have a right to resist even if you weren't a thane. If you were, later still, an Anglo-Norman living on the same shore when the French came to loot and burn your village, you would have a right to resist having your home looted or burned even if you weren't a knight. 

This kind of thing is called a natural right. It is rooted in what St. Thomas Aquinas called the natural law. 

The natural inclination of humans to achieve their proper end through reason and free will is the natural law. Formally defined, the natural law is humans’ participation in the eternal law, through reason and will. Humans actively participate in the eternal law of God (the governance of the world) by using reason in conformity with the natural law to discern what is good and evil.... On the level that we share with all substances, the natural law commands that we preserve ourselves in being.... Natural law also commands those things that make for the harmonious functioning of society (“Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not steal”). 

'Thou shall not kill' is one of the more famous mistranslations in the Bible. 

“The original Hebrew, lo tirtsah., is very clear, since the verb ratsah. means ‘murder,’ not ‘kill.’ If the commandment proscribed killing as such, it would position Judaism against capital punishment and make it pacifist even in wartime. These may be defensible or admirable views, but they’re certainly not biblical.”

So you can kill, but not murder. When might killing not be murder? Well, when it is necessary to fulfill the natural law: to preserve life, and the harmonious functioning of society. For example, when resisting a horde intent on burning and looting your village. Allowing looting and burning might actually kill people who were just minding their own business, and it will definitely degrade the harmonious function of society. The latter is the higher and better end, notice: you might think avoiding death was more important, but in fact on Aquinas' model that is just a thing that we have in common with plants and animals. The better end, proper to human beings as creatures of reason, is to preserve a harmonious society that fulfills the human good in a fuller way. 

Dying to do that is honorable; it is why we praise soldiers who fought and died for our way of life. Killing to do that is acceptable, if necessary, and at least according to George S. Patton it is preferable to kill than to die for your country. 

Positive laws that come to defy or refuse the natural law are rightly reformed. Today we saw that our positive laws in fact defended the natural rights. It is important to ensure they continue to do, and to reject attempts to reframe them in ways that would defy this natural right to preserve our homes against lawless violence.