Edited to remove accusations that everyone might be a joker and emphasize the more substantive point that there are liberties more deserving of our undivided attention and relentless defense than the right not to live next to a guy with a rifle.

Not long ago, activists protested war and sat-in against racial oppression. Recently they protested consumption of foreign food and today they sat-in for the pyrrhic passage of useless policy. We should be more than a little embarrassed by politicians sitting in for gun control when they could be defending genuine Constitutional liberties. What if we fought for the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 8th amendments as vigorously as Republicans fight for the 2nd?

Here’s a quick summary of a few of the other original amendments.

• The 4th amendment gives you the right to be secure in your house and against unreasonable searches and seizures and requires probable cause supported by oath or affirmation describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. You’d think that’s a pretty important thing to defend when it was only yesterday that the Supreme Court decided to change “the right of the people” to “the right of the people who remembered to pay their parking ticket”.
• The 5th amendment gives you the famous right to remain silent. More importantly it gives you the right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; [or  have your] private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. What if we wrote about the many people forced to sit in jail only because they can’t post bail as much as about gun control abroad? What if we spoke as much about the perpetual and tragic expropriation of private property under the auspices of civic forfeiture to fund margarita Fridays at the local precinct?
• The 6th amendment gives everyone a right to a speedy and public trial. Wouldn’t it be a pretty honorable to defend this right to the very end when a 16 year old convicted of stealing a backpack commits suicide after waiting in Rikers Island for 3 years instead of writing again about the gun show loophole?
• The pesky 8th amendment says that excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. Half a million Americans sit in pretrial detention. The idea that “pretrial detention” can even exist is appalling enough. Apparently protecting this right isn’t as fun as childish shouting matches, lie-downs, or sit-ins.

Joke we may about how founding fathers couldn’t possibly know about how powerful guns would one day become. But why not also acknowledge how immensely foresightful the they were about things that matter ten times more. That gun control might work is not a sufficient or even relevant metric. Getting rid of a right to fair trial might also save lives. What is fair and reasonable may not always be Constitutional, and what is Constitutional may not always be fair and reasonable. Unfortunately the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we ought to cherish is sacrificed on the altar of a political theater that caters more to the unfiltered emotion residual after tragedy than the extreme liberty and freedom that made his country great.

It isn’t enough that many writers acknowledge the ailing judicial defense of constitutional liberty. If an article was written about a “mass seizure of liberty” every time 3 guys get put in jail on bail they can’t afford, every time a guy gets two weeks of solitary for sneaking in a pillow, every time the police raids a random house either without a warrant or without a justified warrant, or every time the government kills and assassinates someone at home or abroad without declaring and waging war we would be a better country.

Today those on the political extremes defended our liberties with more life and animation than the too many others who applauded politicians sitting down and shouting mean things at Paul Ryan.