Lone Nuts? Not By a Long Shot

We have seen a physician gunned down for providing medical services to women, and now a killing in a Holocaust Memorial. The doctor was killed by someone who had been a frequent "visitor" to his clinic. The Holocaust shootings were done by a man who had tried to abduct an entire board of directors at gunpoint in the past.

Both of these men have been called "lone nuts", but both had a wide group of people who supported them and their intention to take the law into their own hands. They were not only supported by these groups but honored and exalted because of their "commitment" and their daring. Who know how great a role that support played in the subsequent and inevitable killings? What if their followers had urged restraint - and encouraged them to seek a different path? What if the strident public voices such as Limbaugh, Savage, Beck, and many others had backed off, and sought to find another way to deal with the problems?

After all, both the killers and their supporters are victims too. They are victims of their own ignorance and inability to understand the world as it really exists. Both groups are empowered by the religious concept that they know the ultimate truth to begin with, and all facts must be therefore be tailored to fit their own reality. To people like this, abortion is always evil, the holocaust never happened. Sure, they seem foolish when exposed to the facts of life. But they are not exposed, they are sheltered from true reality, and encouraged to act as if they are called by some god to kill the evil-doers of the world and scare others to "come around" and worship those same gods.

No, these people are not "lone nuts" who are acting on their own, they are members of viralent terrorist groups that are bent on bending the rest of us to their will through use of force.