GILBERT, Arizona — The police confirmed Thursday that a former Marine and aspiring politician who led a vigilante border militia group was among five people shot to death on Wednesday in what apparently was a murder-suicide at a home in this suburban Phoenix town.

The leader, Jason Todd Ready, who was called J. T., was known as a gun-carrying, camouflage-clad extremist who preached violence to stop immigrants and drug smugglers from crossing the Arizona desert into the United States from Mexico.

“I firmly believe in having a minefield across the border,” he once said…

The bodies of Mr. Ready, 39, and another man, Jim Franklin Hiott, 24, were found just outside the home’s front door. The bodies of Mr. Ready’s girlfriend, Lisa Lynn Mederos, 47; her daughter, Amber Mederos, 23; and her 15-month-old granddaughter, Lily Lynn Mederos, were inside.

Inside the house, the police recovered two handguns, a shotgun and six projectile grenades, which Tom Mangan, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix, said are strictly for military use. Officers also found two 55-gallon drums containing an unknown chemical. Sergeant Balafas said federal agents were investigating the origin of the weapons and the nature of the chemical, as well as why they were there…

To Harry Hughes, regional director of the National Socialist Movement, the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States, Mr. Ready was “a patriot” — “a sincere and compassionate man,” he said in a telephone interview. Mr. Ready had been a member of the movement, Mr. Hughes said, but resigned two years ago to found the U.S. Border Guard, an armed group that conducted expeditions in the Arizona desert to search for migrants and drug smugglers…

“J. T. Ready has a long history of thuggish and violent behavior,” Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in an interview. “He really typified the ugly racism and violent attitude of a lot of people that we see in the nativist movement.”

In recent years, Mr. Ready tried his hand at politics; in 2007, he was photographed at a rally against illegal immigration with Russell Pearce, a former State Senate president and the architect of Arizona’s contested immigration law, known as S.B. 1070.

Anyone surprised? If you take a good look around you will find nutballs like this on the fringe of political movements that cater to anarchy. Doesn’t matter if they’re Left or Right – though the right-wing gets to claim most of the types who like to pretend they’re defending the white nation from an non-white threat.

There isn’t anything positive to learn from this other than guns in the hands of someone who believes in political violence are just as likely to lead to personal violence and death. That won’t mean anything to the NRA, the Tea Party or any other nativist paranoids.