Info on Holocaust Museum Shooting

From the NYT. Complete article here. I'm having a hard time thinking about a resurgence of American anti-Semitism. The NYT (and many others) are connecting Johanna's murder with this shooting... I just wonder if this is really anti-Semitism that we should worry about or a few really sick people who never got the help they needed. I guess I'd be more worried if either of them had been working with a group rather than alone. I mean of course it is sad and horrible, but there is systemic murder and institutionalized violence going on every day - where is that in the news?

Anyway, details here:

A notebook that law enforcement officers discovered in Mr. von Brunn’s 2002 red Hyundai, which he had double-parked outside the museum’s 14th Street entrance on Wednesday, appeared to offer insight into his mind-set before the shooting.

“You want my weapons — this is how you’ll get them,” Mr. von Brunn wrote in a note he had signed, according to the arrest affidavit.

“The Holocaust is a lie,” the note read. “Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do. Jews captured America’s money. Jews control the mass media.”

Mr. von Brunn’s note refers to himself in the third person by his initials, JVB, saying that he swore “to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

He lashes out at Jews and includes the name of his book, “Kill the Best Gentiles!”

The shooting was the third publicized anti-Semitic incident in the last five weeks. In early May, a Wesleyan University student of Jewish heritage was fatally shot on the Connecticut campus by a man who had written in his personal journal that he thought it was “O.K. to kill Jews.”

In mid-May, four men were arrested in the attempted bombing of two Bronx synagogues.

The F.B.I. said Mr. von Brunn — best known to law enforcement authorities for walking into the Federal Reserve System headquarters in Washington on Dec. 7, 1981, with a bag containing a revolver, a hunting knife and a sawed-off shotgun — was not under investigation at the time of Wednesday’s shooting. But the assistant F.B.I. director for the District of Columbia, Joseph Persichini Jr., said the bureau knew he had an “established Web site that expressed hatred of African-Americans and Jews.”

Mr. von Brunn’s actions were “not what this country stands for,” Mr. Persichini said, adding that it was important to send a message that the F.B.I. would stop “other Mr. von Brunns that are around here in this nation today.”

Mr. von Brunn, who lived in Lebanon, N.H., at the time of the Federal Reserve incident, told the police he wanted to take Fed board members hostage to focus attention on their responsibility for high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties.

Local and federal authorities in Washington said Thursday that they were focusing on Mr. von Brunn’s intentions and how he got the rifle. Because of his felony conviction in the crime at the Federal Reserve, he was prohibited by federal law from buying or possessing a gun. But Mr. von Brunn could have had the rifle, described by the authorities as “an older weapon,” since well before his conviction.

Mr. von Brunn brought a .22-caliber rifle and a .30-30 rifle when he moved into an apartment in Annapolis, Md., two years ago, according to the affidavit. The police recovered the .30-30 as well as ammunition for a .22 from his bedroom after the museum attack.