Freedom like a shopping cart

This has the potential to be long-winded, but I want to write more often and in order to do that, I need to be more concise. So, I just read an article on people taking their guns to protests in Arizona, simply because they have the right to. That's it, no other purpose, just doing it because they are allowed to, and somehow feel like this is their patriotic duty. What really blows my mind is that those folks are carrying semi-automatic rifles to exercise their rights. These are weapons built for the sole purpose of inflicting and threatening to inflict, serious, if not mortal, injury to another human being. Maybe I'm missing something here, but people that feel the necessity to carry such an instrument of death in public, and thus expressing an utter contempt for the sanctity of human life, are putting themselves in the company of people that I'm glad not to belong to myself. I would be hesitant to completely forbid owning these guns, and at the same time I think stricter gun control laws don't infringe on the constitutional right to own weapons. But I think that as a society, can't we all agree that that kind of gun, again built for a very specific condemnable purpose, has no place where people are publicly gathering.

I think an argument could also be made that stricter gun control does not undermine the foundations of a free society, as a limitation of free speech would, for example, but that is really beside the point. Also, why do some Americans think that they are so much more free than the rest of the Western world? People have asked me questions alluding to this ever since I started visiting this country, and while there are some things you are allowed to do here, there are a million more that you are not. Anyway long story short, I think equal access to health care is very much in the spirit of equality and freedom for all. I was going to argue that the US Constitution guarantees the right to anti-depressants, but then I would not be concise anymore. But ask me about it.