I believe Delphic Oracle is right. The problem here lies with the reader, not with anything she's said.
Two distinct events:
(1) A person uses an aerosol can to spray flames toward an opposing crowd at a counterprotest.
(2) A person fires a gun at the feet of an opposing crowd at a counterprotest.
Both actions are threatening. Depending on circumstances, both are illegal. The second one is much worse, deserving a reasonably serious sentence, given what we know. The first could also deserve to be tried, but this probably falls under the prosecutor's discretion.
This is not nuance. This is not hard to understand. If you can't help thinking that anyone who says it's not good to spray fire towards others in a threatening manner is a nazi-sympathizer, then the problem is on your end.
Seeing what Mr. Wizard was charged with, discharging a gun within 1000 feet of a school, I suddenly realized why those sorts of laws were a good idea. I had thought they were just "feel good" "think of the children" sorts of laws, but they were tailor made for situations similar to this one.
High schools are full of young, stupid, people, some of whom are hotheads, drug users, and gang members. Fights are part of the landscape. However, sometimes things get way out of hand, and guns show up. That's very, very, dangerous. These laws give a way to prosecute some clown who shows up with a gun and endangers everyone in the neighborhood, but giving prosecutors a lower burden of proof. Now, when some sort of scuffle breaks out, they have a tool to arrest the yahoo that escalates things beyond a display of testosterone into a deadly situation.
In this particular case, if you charge the klansman with assault, you can mount a defense by saying that you didn't initiate the assault, that you were in fact defending against another assault by a different perpetrator. He has a weapon. You have a weapon. He didn't hurt anyone. You didn't hurt anyone. There's a certain symmetry, and if you can get one juror to say that your assault was justified by his assault, you win.
(Sorry about the confusing pronoun switches there, but you get the idea.)
Now, though, there's a law that makes use of a gun in such situations explicitly illegal. It's a lot harder to convince a jury that you didn't fire a gun.
If there was a genuine risk to your own life or the lives of others, you could still mount that as a defense, but it's a lot tougher sell. Without that law, Mr. Wizard could, with some credibility, say that he had no intention to harm flamesprayer guy, but was only doing something to intervene to protect innocent people. Because firing a shot is, in and of itself, a crime, he has a much more difficult case to make. I see now that although they did not envision neo-nazis and outraged counter-demonstrators, they did envision two people or groups of people deliberately provoking a fight, and they have a tool to cut through any "he started it" or "I was just warning him" arguments. You fired a gun. That's illegal. Go to jail.
