They don't just come out of nowhere

You can read about the background of "Richard Poplawski, the 23-year-old who killed three police officers yesterday in Pittsburgh, evidently out of fear that his guns were going to be taken away." Just go to Crooks and Liars for an interesting article about him and the company he kept and the context in which his neurons were, uh, misfiring.

He slept with a gun under his pillow in a basement room filled with firearms and ammunition, convinced that Jews controlled the media and President Obama was scheming to take away his arsenal, friends and relatives said Saturday.

"He was a violent, abusive man. He dragged me by the hair, pulling me across the floor. I saw him choke his own mother. He was controlling," said Melissa Gladish, 23, of Verona, his former girlfriend who received a protection from abuse order against him in 2005. She said she had no doubt he would kill someone.

Hate literature like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion can spread poison around the world and down through generations, bearing evil fruit. (What are those, you ask? An early 20th century forgery to slander Jews put forth by an instigator of a pogrom. "The Protocols has been proven to be a forgery, a fraud and a hoax, as well as a clear case of plagiarism.") I remember people in my Fundamentalist youth who were convinced by this propaganda of great Jewish evils. This shit has been around for over a century and people are still buying into it. The current Wikipedia article includes someone defending it.

Poplawski's best chum Eddie Perkovic encourages people to read David Duke and the Protocols.

So, a paranoid racist thug lures police officers to their death.

Markos writes about the consequences:

Obama isn't coming for anyone's guns. The NRA won that battle years ago and the Democrats have long since moved on. Yet the eliminationists carry on, whipping their readers and listeners into a frenzy of panic and fear, and as a result, four little girls (and a young woman) don't have dads tonight. And I fear today was just the beginning.

David Neiwert, a freelance journalist based in Seattle, has just published The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (PollPoint Press, May 2009). Neiwert has written at great length and in great detail for years now on his blog, Orcinus, about the issue of eliminationism, the perspective that thinks some folks need to be eliminated. He writes about Poplawski here.

Where might nutjobs get their extreme ideas?

Have you listened to Glen Beck or Rep. Michelle Bachmann, lately?

Oh, btw, Bill O'Reilly, who pulls endless nonsense out his ass, began his Talking Points Memo section with this provocative question: "Is President Obama selling out America?"

There is a whole lot of crazy going around.

If you get a chance, stand up to it.

Oh, and just in case you're wondering whether I hold the NRA accountable for this sort of thing, the answer is: Yes.

[Which does not mean I am opposed to gun ownership.]
--the BB