The Army later said the demonstrators rioted; the general claimed armed soldiers were attacked. Many of the demonstrators were wounded; the number who died will never be known - the government claimed it was only one. The commanding general declared that the demonstrators were driven by 'the essence of revolution,' and that it was 'beyond the shadow of a doubt' that the demonstrators had been about to seize control of the government.
The commander was Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
The place was Washington, D.C., not Beijing.
The date was 1932, not 1989.
The 'assault rifles' were bolt-action Springfield Model 1903s, not AK-47s. The peaceful demonstrators weren't students in Tiananmen Square demanding the equivalent of our First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the right to petition the government for grievances. The demonstrators on the Washington mall and nearby Anacostia already had those rights; their problem was that they used them. They were Americans - World War I veterans, thrown out of work by the Great
Depression (created by the Federal Reserve), lobbying for government to immediately pay their promised Veteran's Bonus.No, the attack on the Bonus Marchers, bad as it was, wasn't the brutal mass murder unleashed upon the students in Beijing. The American people wouldn't have tolerated it - and had the means to stop it. What happened at Tiananmen Square was the kind of ruthless tyranny that has occurred in other lands throughout history, and is precisely what the Founding Fathers
feared might be done by the powerful central government they were creating under the United States Constitution. That's why the people refused to ratify that Constitution until it was amended to guarantee certain individual freedoms known today as the Bill of Rights. That's why the First Amendment guarantees of speech, assembly and petitioning the government were backed up by the Second Amendment guarantee that the right of the people to keep and bear arms was not to be infringed. And when, during debate on the amendment, some senators attempted to limit the right to apply only to 'the common defense' which is what some people today say it is, the Senate rejected it. That piece of 'legislative history' clearly shows that the Second Amendment was intended to be an individual right; not merely a 'collective right' of states to have militia. But don't tell me it can't happen here -- because it has already happened here!"
