Evil acts and murderous hearts (Erin)

A man in his late 80s has shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An elderly gunman, said by authorities to have a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past, stepped inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, opened fire with a rifle and fatally wounded a security guard before being shot by other officers.

The assailant was hospitalized in critical condition, leaving behind a sprawling investigation by federal and local law enforcement and expressions of shock from the Israeli government and a prominent Muslim organization.

Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier said the gunman was "engaged by security guards immediately after entering the door" with a rifle. "The second he stepped into the building he began firing."

Law enforcement officials said James Von Brunn, 88, a white supremacist, was under investigation in the shooting, and a second official said the elderly man's car was found near the museum and tested for explosives. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss the investigation just beginning.

Museum officials identified the dead guard as Stephen T. Johns, a six-year veteran of the facility. In an e-mail, director Sara Bloomfield said he "died heroically in the line of duty."

Von Brunn has a racist, anti-Semitic Web site and wrote a book titled "Kill the Best Gentiles."

In 1983, he was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board and served more than six years in prison. He was arrested two years earlier outside the room where the board was meeting, carrying a revolver, knife and sawed-off shotgun. At the time, police said Von Brunn wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation's economic difficulties.

This is terrible--yet another situation in which a man at the fringes of society turned to violence and murder. I want to be clear: I find the beliefs of white supremacists to be vile and evil. The same Catholic Church which teaches me to value all human life from conception to natural death also teaches me that racism is a grave sin; both of these teachings have their roots in the notion that human life is sacred, that we are all created as God's children, and that unjust discrimination and prejudice based on things like race or national origin are an attack on the image of God in Whose image we all are made.

As an American, I cherish the right to freedom of speech, but there are unpleasant realities associated with that right, and chief among those is the difficult fact that we must allow the hateful, sinful, degrading and noxious speech of people like James Von Brunn to exist alongside the thoughts and opinions of everyone else. When speech turns into deadly action, we may wish that we'd never let the speech exist--but to do otherwise would threaten one of our best liberties, something Americans enjoy without even realizing how rare this liberty is, or how greatly we would be deprived without it.

I can't really imagine the evil of festering in hatred toward whole groups of one's fellow men for nearly nine decades, as Brunn has apparently done. But then, I couldn't really fathom the evil that Scott Roeder was capable of, either; murder is murder, and there is no justification for it, ever. Speech, whatever lawful form it takes and however strongly we disagree with it, is not terrorism--but evil acts carried out with murderous hearts and a callous disregard for the lives of those who stand in your way most decidedly is, and must be condemned.