Orwell said that pistols and rifles were inherently democratic weapons. What he meant by the statement is that a pistol makes a five-foot tall female state trooper as deadly as anyone else.
So when the guardians of democracy come under fire, it’s nice to know they don’t play:
The shooter walked up to the checkpoint at the Pentagon’s subway entrance in an apparent attempt to get inside the massively fortified Defense Department headquarters. “He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting” no more than five feet away, Keevill said. “He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.” The Pentagon officers returned fire with semiautomatic weapons. (Emphasis mine)
We’ve had an amateur 9/11 and an amateur anthrax scare at IRS offices and now a random shooter at the Pentagon. But there’s no domestic right-wing terror problem.
Does it take a mass-casualty incident to convince us hate takes courage from such treatment? But never mind: this asshole is dead and a don’t feel a bit sorry for him.
And yes, he was apparently a true-believing libertarian. Who…wait for it… who tried to take on the Pentagon with a handgun.
He knew exactly what he was doing; he was rational, but full of irrational self-justifications. His conscious decision to take on a heavily-guarded government building is the description of a suicide mission. That is often the case with Lone Wolf attacks: the first rule of dealing with suicidal people is that they also tend towards homicide.
There is a reason why McVeigh checked out.
