Conservative blogger: Loaded guns at anti-Obama rallies are fine

But the hysteria about them has been even more ludicrous. Numerous people claim to believe that this makes it likely, even certain, that someone will shoot at the president. This is very silly, because the president is not anywhere most of the gun-toting protesters, who have showed up at all sorts of events. It is, I suppose, more plausible to believe that they might take a shot at someone else. But not very plausible: the rate of crime associated with legal gun possession or carrying seems to be very low. Guns, it turn out, do not turn ordinary people into murderers. They make murderers more effective.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, when offered the opportunity to put some money down on the proposition that one of these firearms is soon going to be discharged at someone {ed: "someone", not the president}, they all decline. It is starting to remind me of that C.S. Lewis quote from Mere Christianity:

"Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred."

To be clear, as I said in my previous post, I think carrying a gun to a protest is at best stupid. Whether or not they intend to provoke hysterical fear among a substantial portion of the population, they clearly are doing so, and that is not how you make your best case for the second amendment. It's also not very nice, even if you didn't mean it. So I think they should stop. Meanwhile, I think that the left should also stop claiming, on little evidence, that they are crazed militia members. Doesn't that seem like a reasonable compromise?