Noodling on the Bill of Rights

So why would I be willing to commit to action on behalf of the First Amendment to the Constitution but not the Second?

Well, I suppose it's because First Amendment rights remain to my ideas of freedom more than gun ownership (let alone well-ordered militias.) When I look rules that would oppress me in democracies other than the United States, they involve lack of fundamental commitment to dissent and nonconformity, to freedom of expression as a matter of principle, and as a final rather than instrumental value. Whether or not private gun ownership is permitted, or the extent to which it is regulated, doesn't seem to correlate at all, let alone as some sort of hypothetical counterweight to the state's ability to organized violence, and positively irrelevant to the other ways in which it swindles or coerces compliance.

Similarly, while search and seizure rules, the right to an attorney, and habeus corpus appear to me central to individual protection, I just don't feel the same way about a citizen's right to not inciminate himself, which implies an adversarial - or at least nonparticpatory relationship - between a state and its citizens beyond what I think is necessary. If I can be compelled to tattle on someone else in service of the state, I don't see why I shouldn't also have an obligation to give a full and frank account of my own conduct in criminal matters., in the presence of my attorney and in a court of law, although still free from violence or the threat of violence.