We've been saying for a long time that ardent neo-Nazis like J.T. Ready of Arizona are ticking time bombs, walking violent atrocities waiting to happen. Yesterday, he proved the point in a horrifying way:

A border militia leader on Wednesday shot and killed four people at a Gilbert home, including a toddler, before committing suicide, sources said.

Sources identified the shooter as Jason "J.T." Ready, a reputed neo-Nazi who made headlines when he launched a militia movement to patrol the Arizona desert to hunt for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.

Authorities have not identified the other victims, but reached by phone Wednesday afternoon, Hugo Mederos said the victims were his ex-wife, Lisa; their daughter, Amber; Amber's boyfriend, whose name The Republic is withholding until his next of kin could be notified, and Amber's 18-month-old baby, Lilly.

Mederos, who lives in Tampa, said Ready lived at the home with his girlfriend, Lisa.

Ready was a former Marine who headed the U.S. Border Guard, a militia-style group that routinely performed armed patrols in the southern Arizona desert. Early this year, Ready had formed an exploratory committee for a run as Pinal County sheriff.

In recent years, Ready has been grabbing headlines by organzing vigilante border patrols. Ready's onetime political ally, Russell Pearce, was just chased out of public office by Mesa's voters.

What's striking about the saga of J.T. Ready is how he represents the most telling feature of right-wing extremist movements: like Shawna Forde, Jason Bush, Tim McVeigh, Scott Roeder and Jim David Adkisson before him, he has proven to be a violent and unstable personality capable of inhuman atrocities.

These kinds of movements attract these kinds of personalities because so many of their leaders are also unstable and violent personalities, and the rhetoric their movements employ to attract followers so closely replicates the impoverished interior life of the psychopath, one in which any kind of rationale works to justify naked bigotry.

I was reminded of this watching old video of Ready complaining that calling National Socialists like himself "Nazis" is an unkind smear: