Again

It happened again.

James von Brunn, who has a long history of virulently hating Jews, blacks and everyone else who is not white and Protestant, walked into the Holocaust Museum in Washington yesterday and opened fire, killing a security guard before he was shot himself and arrested. There are so many angles one can take with this horrible story it's hard to know where to begin.

Soon after President Obama took office, a report requested by the outgoing Bush Administration on the dangers of violent right-wing extremist groups (the KKK, armed militias, violent racists and anti-Semites, etc) was leaked. Led by Fox News, the GOP screamed that the report was actually about mainstream conservatives, to the point where Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano knuckled under and retracted it. Will everyone who led this shrieking chorus now apologize?

As a convicted felon who in 1981 walked into the Federal Reserve's HQ in Washington armed with a shotgun and threatened to kill everyone inside, von Brunn should never have been allowed anywhere near a gun. How did he get it? Did he buy it at a gun show, at which background checks are still not required? Did he bribe the owner of a gun store to let him have one anyway? Did he get it from one of his neo-Nazi comrades?

Will the guns-for-everyone crowd finally remember the first part of the Second Amendment, the part about a "well regulated militia?" I'm pretty sure the Founding Fathers didn't intend the nation to be filled indiscriminately with mechanisms of death and mayhem.

And will all the pundits who pollute the airwaves with hatred and paranoia, who spin wild fantasies that a president with the middle name of "Hussein" is a traitorous tyrant who must be stopped at any cost, who regularly use the language of war and violence - will they finally realize that there are people out there who take their overblown rhetoric literally?

They will - for maybe a day. Then it will be back to business as usual.

Until the next time, that is.