Why does the Geneva Convention forbid medics from carrying any more than the most basic of self-defense weapons?
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The Geneva Conventions declare medical personnel to be non-combatants. Depending on which army, they may or may not carry rifles to defend themselves. However, it would be very difficult to argue that someone carrying anything more than the bare minimum weapon that a soldier might carry is a non-combatant. Painting a red cross on a howitzer would be a bit ridiculous.
Many of the rules about noncombatant status exist to make sure that people don’t take advantage of the protection and exploit it in perfidy. If this was tolerated, the writers expected that it would result in people disregarding noncombatant markings because of the possibility of perfidy.
If a medic is firing his weapon, it is not a war crime to fire upon him. You can expect any and every soldier to be issued a rifle. However, they would not issue anything more (e.g. grenade launcher, automatic rifle/light machine gun, designated marksman rifle, anti-tank launcher at the squad level, machine gun, heavier anti-armor weapon, at the platoon level, mortar or other heavier weapons at the company and battalion levels) to someone who isn’t expected to use it outside of situations when he is personally fired upon. Those things are expensive and giving it to one of those guys means that you have one less to fire at the enemy. Anyone who has one of those can be expected to be using it, and therefore, not a noncombatant. Routinely giving other weapons out to people wearing noncombatant markers would cause adversaries to assume perfidy and fire upon actual medics.
Some medics do forego noncombatant status and carry heavy firepower with them for various reasons (including but not limited to that the opposing forces do not care about noncombatant status, is not a signatory, and is willing to do things that would be war crimes if they were signatories). One example is the Israeli Defence Force’s tank-ambulances, another example is the heavily armed helicopters that the United States Airforce pararescuemen ride in (the helicopters that the US Army sets aside to be used exclusively for medical evacuations do not have any weapons and have a red cross carried on them).
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