Last June 10, James von Brunn was armed with a rifle when he burst into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as several thousand people milled around and looked at exhibits. He emptied his gun into the crowd, killing an African-American security guard, 39-year-old Stephen T. Johns, before being shot and hospitalized in critical condition (he died in early January 2010).
On February 17 of this year, Joseph Stack of Texas sent a very personal anti-government message by flying a small plane into a federal building in Austin to protest American tax laws. Before he set his house on fire, loaded his plane with an extra gas tank, and slammed it into a structure holding IRS offices, killing both IRS employee Vernon Hunter and Stack himself, he’d posted this online manifesto:
“I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”
His suicide mission generated numerous supporters in cyberspace, including Facebook groups like “The Philosophy of Joe Stack,” which quickly had 2,000 fans. Websites held tributes to the dead man and then came a video game challenging players to burn down a house and fly a plane into a building.
The Secret Service, meanwhile, has reported that death threats against President Obama have been up 400% since he took office, the highest level ever for a White House occupant. Two preachers, Wiley Drake in Buena Park, California, and Steven Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, have made no secret of their prayers for Obama’s death, and on the Internet, the President’s enemies have geared up to sell t-shirts, teddy bears, bumper stickers, framed tiles, and note pads carrying a Biblical quotation from Psalms 109:8: “Let his days be few…Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.”
On March 4, 2010, John Patrick Bedell of California opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two police officers before he was fatally shot. Bedell had been diagnosed as bipolar or manic depressive and been in and out of treatment programs for years. His parents reported him missing January 4, a day after a Texas Highway Patrol officer stopped him for speeding in Texarkana. He returned to his parents’ home, but the next time he went missing he showed up with a 9mm handgun in D.C. and began shooting outside the Pentagon. His assault came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post, allegedly by U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim with radical Islamic leanings, who killed thirteen people and wounded 30 others. Hit by return fire, he survived the worst mass shooting ever at an American military base. He was convinced that America was conducting a “war on Islam” and he was committed to doing “good work for God.”
All the shooters had one thing in common: they were virulently anti-government and had no compunction about attempting to kill people, usually people associated with our government, for this set of beliefs.
Day after day on national and local talk shows across the country, the federal government is attacked by both the right and the left, but most prominently by those on the right (the day before the recent health reform bill vote in the House of Representatives, protesters spit at African American Congressmen and hurled racial slurs at them). This is, in many cases, a general assault on government itself. Commentators can do freely this under the First Amendment, but at what point do they stop to consider the effect of their words on listeners who might not be stable or as sane, and certainly not as successful in life, as they are? When do they start seeing themselves as powerful members of our society whose thoughts can have a potent impact on others? When do these cease viewing themselves as victims of our society, rather than participants with it and part of the governmental structure they’re assaulting?
Hating government for the sake of it, or the fun of it, is at the very least unproductive and at worst something that incites others already on the edge. How many more mass shootings before we recognize that words matter and feelings count? It’s all an abstract discussion until you’re the one being shot at.