One of the last things we mentioned on Friday was the attempt by a "sovereign citizen" named Dennis Marx in Georgia to shoot and/or bomb his way out of some three-year old drug beefs. Marx got himself iced before he could do the damage he planned to do, but not before he'd run down the first law-enforcement officer who'd confronted him. This was one day after Aaron Ybarra had shot up Seattle Pacific University before being subdued with pepper spray by another student. And this was a few days after the National Rifle Association had told the Open Carry Texas people that they weren'tsupposed to take the rantings of Wayne LaPierre so seriously that they frighten old people, children, and some of the people who send the NRA money. The Open Carry people told the NRA to stuff it, and people started burning their NRA membership cards. The NRA bravely folded like a cheap suit24 hours later. It had been a tough week for the public exercise of Second Amendment freedoms.

That was last week.

This is this week.

Details are sketchy, but Metropolitan Police Department sources close to the investigation say the shooters shouted that "this is the start of a revolution" before opening fire on the officers, and draped their bodies with cloth showing a Revolutionary War-era flag. Investigators have also found paraphernalia associated with white supremacists. Sunday night, Metro homicide investigators and FBI agents cordoned off and were searching a small apartment complex at 110 S. Bruce St., about four miles from the shooting scene. A resident of the complex said he had spoken with a man who lived in the apartment being searched. He said the man appeared "militant," and often talked about conspiracy theories.

Yeah, like Dennis Marx, these two jamokes allegedly marinated themselves in the stew of guns and paranoia that bubbles daily in the conservative media from fringe radio hosts and chain e-mails all the way up to the polite precincts of the National Review Online and the Fox News Channel. That shouldn't surprise us any more. The enabling of dangerous loons and the empowerment by firearms thereof is simply a staple of conservative politics in this country, yet another fetish object, yet another set of conjuring words for the conservative priesthood, which (always) deplores the activity of a few while realizing in its heart of hearts that it has no political future at the moment, no real substantial constituency, without people like this and millions of others who sharee Dennis Marx's motivations and his view of the world, but who thus far have declined the opportunity to ventilate their fellow citizens.

(And, not for nothing, butit's beginning to drain over our northern border, too.)

But then there's also very important point of comparison between the shooting at the end of last week and the one in Las Vegas yesterday. Both of them were an assault on the justice system in this country, and on the people who represent it.

Sheriff Doug Gillespie said officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, were shot while they ate lunch at CiCi's Pizza, 309 N. Nellis Blvd., at about 11:20 a.m. Sunday. In a late afternoon news conference he said no motive for the attack has been determined. "It's a tragic day," the sheriff said. "We have lost two officers with young families." Beck was a senior patrol officer who had taught Advanced Officer Skills Training and at the Metro academy. He was hired by Metro in 2001 and had a wife and three children. Soldo has been a Metro officer since 2006 and had a wife and baby. Both were uniform patrol officers assigned to the Northeast Area Command. A law enforcement official who has been briefed on the incident said an officer — unconfirmed reports indicate it was Soldo — was refilling a soft drink when the female shooter approached him from behind and shot him in the head, killing him instantly. The woman then shot the other officer several times as he drew his pistol. Gillespie said the officer was able to return fire but it was unclear if he hit anyone.

And this I ask -- where are the cops?

Why are there not a million police officers on the National Mall right now, today, demanding that the Congress and the rest of the political elite take even the most gingerly steps toward disenthralling the country from its insane devotion to its firearms? Why are police officers not walking off their jobs in protest? Why are their professional organizations not raising holy hell about this? They're on the very vanguard of what's happening in this country. They're not simply first-responders any more. They're primary targets, for god's sake. In Las Vegas, two of their brethren were specifically sought out and executed in a pizza joint. For all the talk we hear about how whatever the cops do to people we don't like -- the indigent, the black, the Occupy people -- is justified by the peril of their jobs, for all the unfortunate souls who are tased to death, or shot, because some cop thought he was threatened by "something in the suspect's hand" 100 yards away, for all the Amadou Diallos and Sean Bells who have to be gunned down because they posed some sort of "threat" to armed police officers, where's the public pressure from the people in blue against the people who now actively hunt them down, and against the people whose livelihoods -- political and otherwise -- depends on the cultural and social climate that sustains the people who now are stalking cops in order to kill them at lunch? There's been some movement, but do you know where some of them are? Spectacularly, some of them are on the other side.

The thought that Vermont's top law officers might publicly oppose gun restrictions isn't a novel idea. Sheriffs in Colorado are refusing to enforce that state's new background checks and ban on high-capacity magazines. In Connecticut, tens of thousands of residents are refusing to comply with a new state law that requires registration of guns and high-capacity magazines. In Saratoga Springs, N.Y., citizens publicly protested the state's new SAFE Act last week by burning a thousand gun registration forms.

Tragically, the paranoid gun culture nurtured by the NRA, GOAL, and their pet politicians has leached into the law enforcement apparatus, especially at the level of the local sheriffs' offices. Put plainly, after the events of the past five days, any police officer who drives himself home at night in the family sedan with the NRA sticker in the back window is a traitor to the uniform, and is demonstrating a profound lack of respect for the brother officers who were killed in Las Vegas for the crime of being cast in the role of some Redcoats in the Bunker Hill fantasies of two murderous loons. And that was how last week ended, and how this week began in a lushly armed and increasingly dangerous country.

UPDATE -- Of course, there's always the traditional American response. Arm yourselves to the teeth and prepare to make war on somebody here.

During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft. The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of "barbering without a license."

UPDATE THE SECOND -- Well, whaddya know? The Universal Theory Of Everything holds true once again.

Brandon Monroe, 22, has lived in the complex for about two weeks. He said the man who lived in the apartment that was being searched often rambled about conspiracy theories. He often wore camouflage or dressed as Peter Pan to work as a Fremont Street Experience street performer. A woman lived with him, Monroe said, but he didn't see her as often. They were weird people, Monroe said, adding that he thought the couple used methamphetamine. "The man told Monroe he had been kicked off Cliven Bundy's ranch 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas while people from throughout the U.S. gathered there in protest of a Bureau of Land Management roundup of Bundy's cattle." Jessica Anderson, 27, said. She lived next door. Reached Sunday, the rancher's wife, Carol Bundy, said the shooting and the April standoff against the federal government were not linked. "I have not seen or heard anything from the militia and others who have came to our ranch that would, in any way, make me think they had an intent to kill or harm anyone," Carol Bundy said.

Congratulations, Sean Hannity. You turned an aging deadbeat into an icon for copkillers.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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