The Las Vegas murders: Why ‘crazy’ matters

Please indulge my colloquial use of the term “crazy” for the purposes of this column. I mean no disrespect to people who suffer from mental disorders.

But surely “crazy” is an apt expression to describe events in Las Vegas last week, as well as their perpetrators. A heavily armed married couple, Jerad and Amanda Miller, walked into a CiCi’s Pizza and killed two police offificers, Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo.

Beck and Soldo had stopped for lunch and were caught off guard by the Millers. Jerad Miller shot Soldo in the back of the head at close range, and then the couple opened fifire on Beck.

Reportedly the Millers pinned a note on one offificer’s body announcing “the beginning of the revolution,” and they draped the other offificer with a swastika and a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flflag, a prominent tea party symbol.

The Millers walked across the street to a Walmart, where they killed a civilian. Then the Millers died by police bullets and suicide.

So let’s assign the Millers to the “crazy” category. They reside suitably among the criminally deluded, insane and mentally unbalanced, along with, say, Timothy McVeigh and, maybe, Islamic jihadists who blow up themselves and innocents with suicide vests in support of a bad cause that they believe in fervently.

But what about John Brown, the passionate abolitionist, who believed that the United States could be freed of slavery only by violence? He was willing to kill for a good cause. In 1859 he led a raid on a federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Va., hoping to arm slaves and ignite a rebellion that would lead to their freedom. He was captured and hanged.

Brown’s mental stability has been the subject of considerable debate. In fact, historian David Donald says that Abraham Lincoln called Brown “insane.”

Do the Millers, McVeigh, Islamic jihadists, and Brown all belong in the same category? I’m not sure. But at the least they obscure any bright line that might help us make sense of the range of commitment to a cause that spans supportive to devoted, preoccupied, obsessed, fanatical, and then, fifinally, “crazy,” where people are capable of almost anything.

Of course, intense devotion to a cause does not imply moral equivalence between good and bad causes; abolitionism is not the same as support for violent interpretations of Sharia law. It makes a difference what people believe in.

So what did the Las Vegas murderers, the Millers, believe in? The New York Times referred to their “antigovernment obsession,” and evidently for a time they joined the “antigovernment militia” that assembled at the Nevada ranch of tax outlaw Cliven Bundy.

Certainly, antigovernment sentiment is prominent on Jared Miller’s Facebook page, especially concerns about the Second Amendment. But he touches other right- wing bases, as well: Benghazi, climate change, privacy, anti-Muslimism, and even the Bergdahl prisoner swap.

But what’s really spooky about Miller’s page is how unremarkable it is. His last message (“The dawn of a new day. May all of our coming sacrififices be worth it”), sent the day before the shootings, is ominous only in retrospect. Otherwise, his sense of oppression and self-righteousness, the conviction that only he and a few others know the “truth,” and above all his fear that someone is coming to take away his beloved guns are entirely consistent with the levels of passion on thousands of other Facebook pages and in my emails every morning and on right-wing radio and television.

Are these people crazy, too? Most of them probably aren’t. But their unrelenting, superfificial, onedimensional narrative - government is bad, and dangerous people are plotting to take away our rights, and especially our guns - is crack cocaine to people like the Millers who are already hovering somewhere along the spectrum between obsessed and “crazy.”

Given our infatuation with guns, unless we stop feeding this lazy, uncritical narrative, look for more murders by people like the Millers.

In a rare victory for common sense in the gun debate, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that the federal ban on “straw” purchases can be enforced even if the person who eventually gets the gun is legally allowed to have one. The 5-4 decision was written by Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a frequent swing vote, voted with the majority.

Kagan found that any other reading of the statute, which prevents someone from buying a gun for someone else, would gut the federal law. The case involved a Virginia man who bought a Glock handgun for his uncle who lived in Pennsylvania. Bruce James Abramski Jr. assured the Virginia dealer that he was the actual buyer of the gun and then lied on a federal form. His uncle was legally allowed to buy a gun, but Abramski, a former police officer, thought he could get his uncle a better deal using his police discount.

Abramski argued that his false statement on the form was immaterial and that as long as the ultimate buyer was legally allowed to have a weapon, he had done no wrong. Kagan wrote that the government’s system of background checks and record keeping wouldn’t mean much if a buyer could get around them by having someone else make the purchase.

Absolutely right. That information helps police to fight serious crime. When officers recover a weapon, they need the ability to accurately trace it to the buyer. If the law can be flouted, it has no meaning.

“The overarching reason is that Abramski’s reading would undermine - indeed, for all important purposes, would virtually repeal — the gun law’s core provisions,” Kagan wrote. “The twin goals of this comprehensive scheme are to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and others who should not have them, and to assist law enforcement authorities in investigating serious crimes. And no part of that scheme would work if the statute turned a blind eye to straw purchases - if, in other words, the law addressed not the substance of a transaction, but only empty formalities.”

In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the language of the law was not clear enough to make it a crime for one lawful buyer to purchase a gun for another lawful buyer.

The police need all the lawful tools they can get to fight crime. Upholding a sensible federal law that allows them to do so with no harm to the rights of gun owners helps. Gun activists decried the decision, of course, because that’s what they do. Don’t listen. The court got this one right.