Why are guns at political protests bad? It’s not because they may pose a threat to political figures like President Obama (though they do), it’s because guns at such events can serve only two purposes. One of those is to silence legitimate free speech and peaceful asssembly through the use of intimidation. The other one? They can be used to shoot people. Any people who just happen to be in and around the area. For example:

ROSEANN CANFORA: The shooting itself took thirteen seconds. The photograph that you’ve probably seen and many of the historic photographs of that day, where Alan was carrying the black flag, he was the student activist who walked closest to the Guard when they were on the field. So there’s a photograph of us in the Davies book where he walks close to them with the black flag, and I could see they were aiming at him. So I said, “This is—you know, they’re aiming their guns. Let’s, you know, get out of here.” And he said, “I want to see where they’re going,” because that’s when they started their ascent.

I went back to the parking lot. Alan stayed, you know, down in that area. And like I said, when the shooting started, thirteen seconds of gunfire. If you look at a watch and you watch a secondhand tick by, you realize what a hideously long time that is for men with gas masks and steel helmets to look through the scopes of their weapons, aim into the crowd in the distance, of unarmed college students, and then to fire for thirteen long seconds. […]

Three feet behind me was the body of Bill Schroeder. He was an ROTC student who was against the war. And I could tell that he was dead. He had blood splattered all over his neck, and he had been shot in the back. And I saw someone attending to a young woman in the Prentice parking lot. That dorm you see over there, I mean, like as far away as the last car that you see there, is where Sandy Scheuer was. I saw Bill Schroeder there. I ran over to Sandy. Sandy was a friend of mine. She was so grey, because she’d been shot through the jugular vein over 300 feet away. And it’s that moment when I had seen two students prone, and both of them dead, that I remembered that the last place I saw Alan would have put him directly in the line of fire.

So I started running across the parking lot and toward the body of Jeff Miller, just praying that it wasn’t Alan. And it was just when I came upon Jeff’s body that one of Alan’s friends came up behind me and said Alan and Tom both got hit.

It was—I was nineteen. It was surreal at that moment to see people lying dead. But what was most shocking was not just watching these soldiers, American soldiers, making that ascent and then turning and shooting at us, but once they did that horrific deed, as people lay dying, they turned and walked away, went down that hill and left them there. These armed soldiers that were sent to this campus to protect life and property just took life and walked away.

That was state sponsored violence used to intimidate and kill antiwar protesters and innocent bystanders because some bank building windows had been broken earlier in the week of protests. Completely different situation, you might say. But what mechanism exists to prevent “private” gun owners from gathering at rallies and deciding that they have the right to defend themselves from unarmed people who disagree with them? Maybe people shouting at them, arguing with them. Do you really think that the security and law enforcement personnel at these events, whose focus is primarily on the protection of the politicians, would be able to stop a determined group of individuals with guns exercising their “second amendment” right to bear arms if a massacre broke out, whether through mistake or as part of a design by said group to instigate such violence and create martyrs for their cause when law enforcement eventually responded with return fire?

We’ve already seen incidences of politically motivated murders against innocent people by gun toting right wing terrorists in the the case of FOX News junkie, Jim Adkisson, the murder of Dr. George Tiller by Scott Roeder and Holocaust Museum shooter and white supremacist James Von Brunn. In the face of the frequent hatred expressed and veiled threats made against President Obama and his supporters in the media, is it wise to dismiss such fears as ludicrous, as Megan McArdle, a libertarian blogger at The Atlantic has done? Frankly, you have to question the sanity of people brandishing firearms at political events, but even moreso, the intelligence of conservatives who assert this is no big deal. Would they have said the same thing if armed antiwar protesters had appeared outside events staged by former President Bush or Vice President Cheney? I highly doubt it.

Reasonable people can disagree, we are told. However, there is no good reason to bring armed weapons to a political event. None at all. And laughing off the concerns of Obama’s supporters and others who want to see health care reform passed regarding the attendance of armed private citizens at political gatherings is a priori unreasonable.