Vernon Hunter served two tours of duty in Vietnam and returned only to serve his country for many more years, as part of that most hated of federal institutions — the IRS. He had a wife who worked for the same agency, as well as six children.

About a week ago, as I write this, Vernon Hunter was murdered. Andrew Stack flew his one-engine plane into the building where Hunter worked in a poor man’s combination of the Oklahoma City bombing and the events of September 11, having already set his home on fire and uploaded an anti-tax creed/suicide note to his business Web site. His daughter, while disagreeing with his last action, said that she considered her father a hero “because now maybe people will listen.”

If it were just her, okay, fine, but unfortunately there seems to be an inclination on all sides to treat this incident with kid gloves, as if it was somehow completely unexpected. Let’s be clear: Andrew Stack was not a hero. He was a terrorist, just as Timothy McVeigh and the Al-Qaeda hijackers before him, and his final act was not born of heroism, or nonconformity, but of a base violent impulse. I might applaud his willingness to lay his life down for a cause had he been able to show a modicum of caring for the lives of others – but flying a plane into an IRS building displays the exact opposite.

What worries me more is that this kind of militancy is spreading, unacknowledged and always centered on this issue of taxation. It’s as if the Revolutionary War gave the national population a collective obsession with paying less money to the government, to such a degree that some, like Andrew Stack, are willing to kill and be killed for it.