The hardest way to exercise your First Amendment Right in this country comes when you're exercised about the Second Amendment.

When the Bill of Rights seems a bill of goods, when constitutional rights seem to have gone wrong. When we stand, in disbelief, and shake our heads at all we have become.

So many dead in San Bernadino? Dear God, not again. Colorado Springs, Savannah, Charleston? Here we sit again, numb and dumb, stammering to figure what to say in a way that won't blow up all over us. You can't stand against the Bill of Rights. You can't stand against the National Rifle Association. You can't stand against legitimate gun owners who live in fear of losing their weapons.

In the end we can't seem to stand at all. And I can't stand it.

Enough has become enough. It's not just mass shootings and "active shooters," or the horrifying reality that we live in a world that somehow turned that terrible jargon into common speech. Gun violence is an issue every single day in every single part of this country.

This week a 13-year-old kid was charged with assault in Birmingham, accused of shooting a 12-year-old boy on a playground outside a school after what was described as a joke.

And nobody blinks. Not in a way that matters.

Birmingham has seen 81 homicides already this year, most of them by gun. That's more than any full year this decade. Already.

In a state where Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile and Huntsville all rank in the top 100 in homicides among major cities, in a state where Selma and Anniston are more violent still.

We are surrounded by blood and loss and a sense of helplessness that we can do nothing to stop it. We can't even talk about it for fear we will seem un-American, soft on crime or just plain soft in the head.

You can't talk about guns. Not with the NRA firing money into politics like a Gatling gun.

Since 1998 the NRA has spent more than $38.5 million in federal campaigns, according to the Federal Elections Commission. In the last two years it has donated at least $1,000 to every U.S. Representative from Alabama except Democrat Terri Sewell.

Two women comfort each other near the scene of a shooting outside a Southern California social services center in San Bernardino, Calif., where one or more gunmen opened fire, shooting multiple people on Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2015. (KNBC via AP)

I can't stand it. Because we have to take a stand.

To hell with the NRA, which sows fear as a way to make sure as many guns as possible are bought and sold and left lying around. To hell with the NRA. The influence is too great; the rhetoric too wrong.

We have to at least be able to talk about the proliferation of guns and the proliferation of dead bodies they tend to leave behind.

I don't have the answers. I don't know how to solve the problems.

But I know that prayers for the victims don't bring them back or stop the next shooter from opening fire. Not that there is anything wrong with prayers, but politicians who offer empty ones one day and easy access to weapons the next need to examine their faith. I know processions lead only to the grave, that gun buybacks are feel-good but futile gestures. And as long as people and politicians are too timid to question the deification of the gun, the more things stay the same.

We have to stand up, if we want our children to grow in a world, in a country, where "active shooter" is not part of the lexicon, where mass killings do not occur 1.05 times a day.

There must be more than mourning and sadness and numbness. There must be outrage and indignation, and a realization that our safety and our legacy and the pursuit of our happiness has been coopted by cash and characters who encourage our fear.

In the name of rights.

We need to stand, across party lines and beyond the knee-jerk rhetoric of the gun lobby, for a real conversation about the future of this country.

Or, eventually, we won't be able to stand it.