Rep. Mike Pence takes a false equivalency and runs away with it.
PENCE: Well, I remember the press reports about people bringing firearms to — at least it was one press report I remember in the last two years of a firearm being brought to a rally. I personally never witnessed that. I really believe that we enter on to a very slippery slope if we buy into the attempt to assign blame for last Saturday's unspeakable violence anywhere but on the individual who was to blame. My experience whether it was at town hall meetings or Tea Party rallies or national gatherings — my experience back in the heat of the debate over the war in Iraq, when I saw people gathering on the national mall and waving placards that spoke strong opposition to the Bush administration — I walked down the hallway to foreign affairs committee hearings and heard people hurl epithets at me because of my support for the war in Iraq. All of that is what freedom is all about. And the right to peaceably assemble is not simply limited to the right to peaceably assemble in quiet and thoughtful ways.
Waving placards is just like bringing a gun to a political event. See, if Lauren Valle had known that ahead of time, she'd never have gotten her head stomped.