American Nazi opens fire in Holocaust Museum.

That image you are looking at is from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. There is an exhibit of shoes from Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland. In other museums that commemorate the Shoah, there are other mementos. The canisters of Zyklon-B on display. They serve as a reminder of the price of bigotry in human lives. What I want to say to James von Brunn:

You can't shoot away the facts.

This person I've named is the alleged domestic terrorist who fired on security guards at the Holocaust Museum, killing one. At 89 years old, he was certainly old enough to have learned the facts of the Shoah, but he chose to disbelieve them, and in fact clung to some mightily stupid and disprovable things besides his admiration for the Nazis, and his disdain for Jews. From what I have seen--he's a "birther"--a person dumb-assed enough to think that the US might have elected an African native as President and completely failed to notice. But he's also a Holocaust-denier and an all-around hater.

How does a person come to such beliefs? I don't know, not entirely. But one of the things such a person has to believe is that he knows things others do not, and that the majority of the world is willing to believe a lie while he is one of the very few who knows the truth, despite any evidence to the contrary.

It's a paranoid and lonely mindset, not that I sympathize.

What has happened is just part of an uptick in violence lately on the part of the right-wing, deluded, and angry. The 'triggers" for this kind of action are almost besides the point--observers can point out that there was a similar surge the last time a Democratic president was in office (militias, Oklahoma City bombing, etc) but the problem is really the mindset of people who do these things. They believe that their opinion, however out of step with the mainstream, is valid. They romanticize violence. They see "taking action" against other people, even causing deaths, as a positive action. And they view empathy, or even the flexibility to hear contradictory information, as weakness.

In the interest of respect and tolerance for individuals and their opinions, we often observe a kind of tolerance, even for despicable attitudes, with a kind of shrug: "You are entitled to your opinion." But when an opinion is based on lies and the rhetoric leans towards violent solutions, make no mistake--

There is no room for tolerance where that form of intolerance is concerned.