Horst Wessel was an early Nazi who was gunned down in Germany in 1930, either by a communist or by a thug, since Wessel was rumored to be both a political enthusiast and a pimp.

Little matter. Whatever Wessel was, the Nazis made a hero out of him, a martyr for the cause. A song about him, "The Horst Wessel Song," was a Nazi anthem and moved quickly up the charts, no doubt with a bullet.

Jerad Miller and wife Amanda shot two police officers in Las Vegas then committed dual suicide. They didn't like cops and not in the way that drug dealers don't like cops, either. They didn't like cops because they didn't like the government. They were principled about their hatred.

Neighbors said Jerad Miller walked around the area dressed in camouflage clothing with a gun on his hip.

That's not against the law. In many parts of the west and south, walking around with a cannon strapped to your hip isn't a sign that you're deranged, it's a sign that you support the Constitution. As for wearing camouflage clothes when you're not hunting and you're not in the army, most of the guys who do that are like your brother-in-law Mike, who is forever declaring that he's not a "liberal sheep," can talk for hours about the Trilateral Commission and loves to talk about how many cops he'll kill, "when they come for my guns."

Yep. That kind of whack job is now part of a recognizable group of people, like mail carriers or kids who carry skateboards wherever they go. Nice, huh?

You can be sure that the Millers fed themselves at the ever-flowing spring of right-wing, fact-less crap that flows thickly out of hundreds of radio stations. On those stations, the guy lurking behind the microphone talks about President Barack Obama's blackness the way 1960s redneck politicians talked about JFK's Catholicism.

So the Millers ate this stuff, heard people say in public forums, not just that the government is sometimes wrong and sometimes right, which it is, but that government is a nest of socialists controlled by a Kenyan Muslim who faked his birth certificate and wants to enslave us all.

If you really believed that, why wouldn't you shoot a couple cops? They're minions of the black slave master and, someday soon, they're coming for your guns, for your liberty, for your freedom of religion and they're going to make your kids wear turbans to school.

And more and more people, fed heaping platefuls of hateful garbage doled out to the poor by the rich, believe all those things. More every day.

And someday, when everyone believes, they'll write a song for the Millers, because they were brave, because they struck at tyranny, because they were not afraid to die for the cause.

And they'll sing that song at police funerals. In all honor.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Marc Munroe Dion's book of Pulitzer Prize-nominated columns, "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America," is available for Kindle and Nook.