A couple of weeks ago, a fool who didn’t know nearly as much about the law as he thought he did, walked into a Lyon County government office building with a gun and a smartphone with the video camera on. He was very obviously there to provoke some kind of confrontation, and succeeded. It turns out that, while you certainly have a right to film public areas of a public building, doing it while being rude and deliberately suspicious-looking is incredibly stupid.

When armed men skulk about government buildings, people who work there get understandably nervous. In this case, the skulker came face to face in close quarters with one of the women who worked there, who it appears reached out and grabbed his camera. You can’t see much from the edited video he posted online, but at that point he starts squealing like a naughty five-year-old who was told he’d had enough TV time, and according to witnesses, drew his gun while spouting his (generally incorrect) theories on the law of self-defense.

The Lyon County employees got him outside, gave him his phone back, and spoke with him politely, professionally and firmly while the skulker continued his tantrum. The Utilities Commissioner went so far as to helpfully explain how to file complaints against his employees if he thought they’d done something wrong. When police arrived, they arrested him for drawing a deadly weapon in a threatening manner, a misdemeanor.

The story, standing alone, is really nothing more than a tale of aggravated buffoonery of a type anyone who has ever worked in the criminal justice system sees from time to time.  But when the big Nevada news of the day is the criminal charges against armed-insurrection-against-the-federal-government-promoter Cliven Bundy being dropped, it’s tempting to see it as a symptom of something more, a symptom of some greater societal rot, or maybe the beginning of a wave of copycats.

I disagree with that more ominous view. Nonetheless, there are lessons to be learned in comparing the two incidents. The federal government has a lot to learn from a few county employees in rural Nevada.

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The Bundys deserve none of the praise some “conservatives” are heaping upon them. I happen to agree that the feds own too much land in Nevada, and that more of our state lands ought to be available for utilization in a wider variety of ways. But cheering people who simply take the law into their own hands, or ignore the law altogether, will almost always backfire in the end. If Bundy can do whatever he wants on land he doesn’t own, so can anyone else. And inviting an armed rabble to protect your continued “right” to break the law isn’t an expression of patriotism, it’s something that the American government hasn’t tolerated since President Washington rode at the head of an armed force to put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

The rule of law is a critical part of the American experiment. Those who cheer people thumbing their noses at laws they don’t like are encouraging others to ignore laws they might like better. Honestly – how can you simultaneously think Cliven Bundy is a hero, and also believe the Mexican father who sneaks across the border in the hopes of a better life for his family should be locked up?

And what if the government itself followed Mr. Bundy’s lead? To some extent it did – like Bundy, federal agents in the BLM, FBI and US Attorney’s office felt a sense of entitlement to ignore laws and rules they felt were inconvenient. To some extent, this talent for self-justification of the otherwise indefensible (“I’m the Good Guy, so it’s OK when I break the rules) is a character flaw every human carries with us. The founders of our nation understood this, and wisely created not only checks and balances to stop excesses when they cropped up, but limits to what government agents could do in order to limit this sort of thing in the first place.

The case against Bundy wasn’t dismissed because he was innocent, but because the federal prosecutors themselves broke the law and were held to account for it by the judge. It seems to me difficult to accept this as the action of a tyrannical federal government bent on malicious oppression. I obviously have no problem with vigorous criticism of the government, but if the American government was made up of true “tyrants,” Mr. Bundy would either still be in jail or would have already been taken to “The Wall” by now. (See also: Comparing Trump/Obama/Bush to Hitler, Stupidity Of.)

Nevertheless, unlawful and/or foolish actions of various federal agents were not stopped or uncovered until well after they had contributed to putting lives in danger and wasting untold hundreds of thousands of dollars. They forgot who they were and who they served, and forgot that professionalism and courtesy, even to those you are actively prosecuting, is not just a good thing to be, but critical to the health of a civil society.

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As someone perfectly comfortable with gun ownership and even open-carry, people who wear their weapons with the express purpose of goading people into freaking out are repellent to me. As the grandson of a cattle rancher, I have nothing but contempt for Bundy and his lawless clan. As a criminal prosecutor, I am viscerally offended by any of my colleagues failing to meet their most basic obligations to turn over all relevant evidence to the defense team. When people act foolishly in the service of any cause or institution, they harm that cause or institution immeasurably.

The folks in Lyon County confronted with an armed provocateur remembered this, and the result was a foolish-looking skulker beclowning himself all over the Internet, no one getting hurt, and an amusing side story instead of front page tragedy. Our society will be healthier when all of us – government supporter, agent and critic alike – take these lessons to heart.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City. His opinions here are his own. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].