Shootings at the Pentagon Metro

It's becoming overwhelming, this wave of attacks on government facilities and government employees. This time, it's two Pentagon Force Protection Agency officers who were shot: the gunman who attacked them, John Patrick Bedell, is dead.

Gawker's tracked Bedell's obsessions, including libertarian views towards government, 9/11 Trutherism, marijuana legalization, and attempts to create an alternate currency. Unlike Joe Stack, who flew a plane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas, Bedell didn't appear to have an exceptional grievance against any given agency. And the chances of him being traced to, or taken up as a hero, by anti-government groups seems somewhat smaller; his obsessions were too eclectic.

I honestly don't know what's more frightening to me, the idea of a widespread anti-American ideology that inspires attacks on the country, or the prospect of private, unconnected hatreds leading individuals to try to kill government officers on their own. With an ideology, we can understand it, we can study it, we can try to respond to it, or change course, or circumvent it. With these lone, angry men, the prospect of identifying them and preventing their attacks on government facilities seems like an impossible project.