These are things:

Some clown put a gun emoji on a Facebook comment about a school in south Alabama last year, and suddenly there was a countywide manhunt. Schools locked down, fear swept the state and cops vowed to round up the culprits like terrorists.

A kid in Prattville took it farther. He wrote an asinine note claiming there was a bomb at his school. He swore it was just a joke, but the law has no sense of humor. He got jail time for stupidity, if nothing else.

Then in Birmingham this month a guy went on Facebook and made a deal with a couple of high school students. He agreed to meet them for a gun swap - a firearms exchange with minors near a public park.

And it all went south, movie style. Surprise. Somebody said something and a kid drew a gun and ... BAM.

The adult - who wanted to trade his rifle for a pistol - shot 17-year-old Isaiah Johnson and the kid died right there on the ground. But that's not the end of it. The Jefferson County District Attorney's office, the following week, decided no charges would be filed against the killer. It was a good shooting, prosecutors said, because one of the kids drew first and it's OK and legal to sell a minor a rifle.

Making it presumably fine and dandy to set up a gun deal with kids on the Internet, to swap a rifle for an apparently illegal handgun - even in a world where an adult would be tossed under the jail if he'd been trying to score a date with one of them.

Maybe the DA was right. Maybe there was no case. But think about that. It's a world where it's OK to cut weapons deals with kids, where it doesn't even take a grand jury to take a look at it. It's a world that leaps to protect the gun, that has lost perspective and common sense when it comes to weapons.

Because guns have become god to politicians, and the NRA its apostle. Put the Glock on the altar and annoint us in gun oil, America. Beat your plowshares into a pistols and your pruninghooks into repeaters.

If you ain't bowing down to Almighty Gun you're wandering lost in the political wilderness of the Bible Belt.

Birmingham police at the shooting of 17-year-old Isaiah Johnson

Congressmen like Gary Palmer - one of few who actually shows up to talk to constituents these days - initially wanted to hold his town hall meeting this weekend at a gun range.

And Alabama Sen. Gerald Allen has introduced a bill in the Alabama Legislature that would simply do away with laws requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon - a notion that is viewed by many in law enforcement bat-guano nuts - and would repeal other restrictions to allow things like, say, carrying a gun at an organized protest.

Because that's what we need. In Alabama we dare defend our rights.

But all rights are not created equal.

You have a right to free speech, but it is limited. You can't slander or threaten or incite to riot. The free press is not free to libel, and the right to assemble is constrained by circumstance -- and parade permit.

You have the right to worship as you please, unless your God demands peyote. You have the inalienable right to pursue happiness - until it infringes on the public good. You have a right to a speedy trial, but speedy's in the eye of the beholder. You have the right not to be saddled with excessive bail. But a judge decides what is excessive.

And you have the right to keep and bear arms. It's a right like any other, to be respected and protected and guided by logic, wisdom and common sense.

The gun is not God. And the Second Amendment is not under attack.

Reason is.