You might have seen this story last week; I was going to post about it, but then came the Great Blogger Crash. Anyway…

Riverside, CA — The day before he allegedly shot his father, the sandy-haired 10-year-old boy showed off a prized possession to a visitor. It was a thin leather belt emblazoned with a silver insignia of the Nazi SS.

“Look what my dad got me,” the boy said shyly, perched on the living room stairs, one of the few quiet spots in a house with five children.

A little more than 12 hours later, the police say, the boy stood near those stairs with a handgun and killed his father, Jeff Hall, as he lay on the living room couch…. The police say that the killing was intentional, but that the motives behind it are still not fully understood. But whatever the reason, it has cast fresh light on the fringe group to which Mr. Hall devoted his life: the National Socialist Movement, the nation’s largest neo-Nazi party.

Ten-year-old kids don’t know Nazi philosophy from Saturday morning cartoons; to them, it’s just something cool and shiny, and learning how to shoot a machine gun with your dad is no different than playing catch in the backyard. It’s the adults in the room who get to think about what kind of parents raise their children on hate, suspicion, and paranoia.

And for those who say that father knows best and no one has the right to interfere with how they raise their children, I think Jeff Hall just provided them with an answer that reeks of karma.

I watched the segment on 60 Minutes about the sovereign citizens movement and how these people think that they have the right to live outside the law. These folks have been around for a while; I remember hearing about them back in the 1960’s when the civil rights movement got going and they refused to accept the fact that the world was changing and that the government was going to enforce the notion that all men are created equal and are entitled to equal protection under the law (unless you’re a woman or gay, but that’s another post).

The sovereign citizens, along with some of the militias and the neo-Nazis, are throwing what amounts to a temper tantrum and reverting to pre-adolescent behavior where they could dress up in their camouflage uniforms and build a fort in the woods and hide out from the rest of the world until it got dark and they got hungry. Meanwhile, the rest of us get up and go to work and do our jobs while these folks are freeloading and scamming their way through their little world of Make-Believe. It would all be mildly amusing to watch these kids at play except they are playing with real guns and ammo and people, such as police officers, are getting killed.

HT to Obalesque.