Las Vegas Federal Building shooter Johnny Lee Wicks upset about social security payments

It’s ultimately a very a sad story today out of Las Vegas – one retiree trying to make ends meet kills another in a bout of anti-government rage.

Johnny Lee Wicks, the man who is believed to have fired on the Lloyd George US Courthouse today in Las Vegas, Nevada, was a retiree, upset that his social security benefits had been cut, and alleging racial discrimination as the root of the cuts. A federal judge saw otherwise according to the local ABC News affiliate, and threw out his federal racial discrimination lawsuit:

According to court documents, Wicks had filed a lawsuit against the Social Security Administration in April of 2008 alleging racial discrimination. In a handwritten complaint, Wicks said the discrimination had followed him from California to Nevada. Wicks wrote this about one California agent, “Doesn’t try to hide the way he feels about black people so he reduced my benefits.”

Wicks explained he suffered a stroke some years back. He claimed his benefits dropped from $886 to $445 a month and then to $128 a month.

U.S. Magistrate Judge George Foley reviewed the case and determined Wicks’ payments were reduced because Nevada, unlike California, does not provide a state supplement. When Wicks moved to Nevada he was no longer eligible for the supplement.

via Federal Building Gunman Identified – Las Vegas Now.

Wicks apparently set his home in a retirement village ablaze before he took a shotgun to the court building in downtown Vegas and started shooting. He injured a deputy US Marshal and killed Stan Cooper,  a 65-year-old retired Las Vegas cop who was working as a private security guard at the Las Vegas Federal Court building. Wicks himself was killed in the shoot-out, before he could kill or injure anyone farther inside the building, fortunately.

If there’s any good news here, it’s perhaps that there was a fair amount of restraint on the media’s part. Maybe they learned from the case of Bill Sparkman, the US Census worker who hanged himself in Clay County, Kentucky. His death became a lightning rod for our left vs. right kulturkampf as many progressives insisted, ultimately erroneously, that he was collateral damage from conservatives’ too-vociferous anti-government hysterics. Few in the media leaped to the conclusion that the Vegas shoot-out was the result of, say, anti-health care reform attitudes, given that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has an office in the building.

Of course, I’m still trying to be hopeful that the fact that Wicks was a black man shooting at a federal building won’t also be worked into the kulturkampf by agents of conservative histrionics. Rush Limbaugh is taking a few days off after his brush with the medical system, so he won’t be going on air tomorrow to declare that crimes like this happen only in “Obama’s America.” If anyone else out there was thinking about saying something like that, please, don’t. Let’s just all be thankful that there weren’t any more senseless deaths from this tragedy today.