LITTWIN: Blood of slain 'emperor' stains the people's house

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 17, 2007 at midnight

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An apparently disturbed man is armed with a gun and a knife. That's where we begin. It's where we must begin.

An apparently disturbed man, with a gun and a knife, walks into a Northglenn shop to rent a tuxedo. He tells the person waiting on him at Mister Neat's Formalwear that it's a special day. "The emperor," he announces, "is coming."

He's disturbed enough that the woman waiting on him calls the cops.

The cops are disturbed enough that they put out what used to be called an APB on the man and even go to his parents' house to try to find him.

A few hours later, though, this same apparently disturbed man - with a gun and maybe with a knife, too - enters the Capitol building. Anyone can walk into the Capitol building. If an apparently disturbed man has a gun or a knife or both, there is nothing to stop him.

There's no metal detector. There's no guard. There's no barrier of any kind.

They used to have metal detectors for a while after 9/11, but eventually the legislators voted to remove them. They had no choice, I guess. The legislature was in the process of passing concealed-carry laws, and how do you explain that guns aren't the problem if you insist on putting a metal detector on your own door?

When they removed the metal detectors, we were told that the Capitol was the people's building and nothing should stand between the people and this special place. There's something to that. It may sound a little corny, but there's something reassuring about it.

You walk up the west steps and into the building that houses the governor's office and the state legislature and you head to the marble staircase that climbs toward the golden dome. And somehow, everything about it seems right.

This is not a place only for politicians and bureaucrats and lobbyists and reporters. It's for regular folk. Maybe that's a fiction we tell ourselves at night so we can sleep better. But when I get there Monday, after I heard about the man with the gun and before I saw him lying dead in a pool of blood on the floor, I passed by tourists on the steps just outside the building, snapping photos, completely unaware. They hadn't heard a thing.

The Capitol is a quiet place in the summer, except for the seemingly endless noise of construction. Many people working inside the building confused the gunshots with the sound of hammer meeting nail. Why not? There are no gunshots here. A state official was stabbed here back in 1979. But that was long, long ago.

I like the idea of the people's building, the people's house. I remember reading about Lincoln and how he entertained people in the White House on Inauguration Day. And I remember, too, how bad I felt when they first blocked off Pennsylvania Avenue where it ran in front of the White House. I knew then how much had been taken from us.

There are questions that will have to be answered over the next few days. How did the apparently disturbed man get a gun? It's the same question asked about the Virginia Tech killer. It was asked, though, only briefly. We don't ask hard questions about guns anymore, and certainly not in a political season.

But there are even more fundamental questions that you can't help but ask now: How safe do we want to be? How safe can we be? And, in either case, at what cost?

These are the same questions you ask every time you go through airport security and take off your shoes and, if you're ever feeling annoyed, you look up to see the 80-year-old woman in the wheelchair, the one who looks just like your grandmother, taking off her shoes.

They're the same questions you ask when you see the stories about the Patriot Act and whether government should be able to access certain e-mails or monitor certain phone calls.

In London, where they lived through decades of IRA terror, there are cameras everywhere. The cameras could be used to spy on citizens. Or they could be used to, say, identify the 7/7 bombers. It depends how you tell the story.

In this story, an apparently disturbed man - who, the police say, had a handgun - walked into the Capitol and announced that he wanted to see the governor. The apparently disturbed man said, "I am the emperor. I'm here to take over state government."

The receptionist hit a button. A state trooper came to remove him. The apparently disturbed man apparently reached for his gun. Four shots were fired. The man lay dead.

Bill Ritter was OK. He went directly into DA mode, assessing the situation. He'd been to hundreds, maybe thousands, of crime scenes. His wife had been told. The tough moment, he would say later, was when he told his kids.

I talked to some legislators who said a single incident shouldn't change Capitol security. I talked to others who think security must be upgraded.

It's an old argument. Across the street, at City Hall, they've got metal detectors that are just a routine fact of life in a world full of guns. You can be sure something will change at the Capitol.

Of course, the governor has security, which apparently did its job. But there are probably other disturbed people out there, and maybe some who would be emperor. And take away a little more of our freedoms.

littwinm@rockymountainnews.com

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