Marvin Heemayer should not be glorified.

Ugh. Today is the day where I have to remind a bunch of edgy libertarians that Marvin Heemayer was actually a paranoid lunatic who had few real grievances with anyone and a lot of delusional ones based on imaginary interactions with other people that no one - including his own friends and family - could corroborate.

He then rage spiraled to the point where he spent months building a poorly engineered "killdozer" and caused an immense amount of property damage and attempted to murder numerous people including his neighbor, several cops, the mayor's mother and other family members, and negligently bulldozed a library where there was an active daycare.

The fact that he didn't kill anyone but himself is largely a miracle, and a testament to his own incompetence. For example, he tried to kill the police officers who were working to stop the bulldozer by shooting at them with a .50 cal rifle. Some avoided getting shot by hiding behind concrete barricades, which did get hit, but most were spared because Heemeyer's range of motion and view in the makeshift tank he built was very limited.

Also, it's not even clear to me that Heemeyer planned to take his own life initially, but once the steel plate came down over the single point of entry on the "killdozer", he couldn't have gotten out... So it was either that or jail.

He is not a hero. He's not an example of someone who pushed back against tyranny or even a particularly unreasonable government.

His only real complaint was that the city wanted him to pay for utility lines running from the road to his shop... Which is normal. The rest of his "abuses" were based on bad interactions with councilmen and others in the community, and a bunch of perceived slights - a lot of which probably never happened.

He had hours of angry rambling recorded to audio tape which forms the basis of this film, which most of you should watch.

Stop glorifying this jackass.