We live in a very tense point in American history. While people have always disagreed in this country, these days it seems especially worse than almost any time before that didn’t involve an outright war. More and more, it feels like we’re moving toward the point in the history book with the maps and differently-colored arrows.

Because of the tense nature of almost everything, we’re likely to see some ugliness pop up from time to time. I’m not talking about big protests, though those are definitely going to happen as well, but potential violence popping up in places where it typically didn’t before.

Like a pro-life protest.

Police in Delaware arrested a man on gun charges after he allegedly pulled a handgun on a group of anti-abortion protesters in the parking lot of Planned Parenthood, authorities said Saturday.

Dover police said they arrested 31-year-old Jerome Aniska of Wilmington, Delaware.

Police say it happened Friday morning after Aniska engaged with demonstrators that were on a public sidewalk in Dover. Police say during an argument, Aniska pulled out a black handgun and made a threatening statement to the group.

Aniska is, frankly, lucky to be alive.

After all, pro-life protesters tend to also be pro-gun. That means the odds of one of them having a firearm was much higher than it would have been at, say, the Women’s March. Had one of them pulled their own gun and killed him, it would have likely been justified.

I sure as hell wouldn’t have blamed the shooter, that’s for sure.

Of course, Aniska still is due his day in court. Maybe the court will find that he didn’t do anything. Who knows, maybe they’ll find he acted in response to a threat.

I, personally, don’t believe that. Over and over again, we’ve seen unhinged people looking for opportunities to shoot their ideological rivals. It’s not just the left doing this, either. Plenty of numbskulls on the right have done so as well, and everyone needs to knock it off. It’s only a matter of time before we end up with a two-way range. If that happens, no one wins.

As it stands right now, though, Aniska is facing charges such as aggravated menacing, terroristic threatening, and possession of a handgun during the commission of a felony. That suggests he’s looking at some serious time for his actions, though I suspect he feels completely justified by them. He was released on $26,000 bond, which seems a bit light for such a crime.

But that’s just me.

Regardless, this is still another instance of violence being used to try and further political causes. In this case, an attempt to silence pro-life protesters who were, apparently, simply exercising their First Amendment rights in a way that Aniska didn’t care for. More specifically, they were using it to say things he didn’t want to hear.

And really, it’s another example of how some people haven’t grasped the way freedom works. You can’t pull a gun on a protester, then pretend protests they support are peachy. The hypocrisy is too ridiculous at that point, so knock it the hell off.