Chip SomodevillaGetty Images The country is coming so unstrung that I hope Tuesday’s killing outside the Pentagon was just the product of someone who welched on a Super Bowl bet, or who borrowed someone else’s lawn mower and sold it for drug money, or anything else. From WJLA: Shortly before 11 a.m. Tuesday, 7News learned that a shooting occurred near the bus platform outside the Metro and a number of people were hit. Eleven years ago, a man named John Patrick Bedell opened up with a pair of nine-millimeters at a security checkpoint outside a Pentagon subway stop. That happened at a more sensible time, and not almost eight months after an armed assault on the U.S. Capitol. As we are coming up on what is surely going to be a national spasm of emotion on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, because of the events of January 6, we are now back in that tremulous place where every act of violence is freighted with what had come before it, and where anything out of the ordinary carries with it the ominous undertone of what might come next.