The gun-toting wingnuts of America are having themselves one hell of an August, leaving a horrific trail of blood and bodies across the country. The latest multiple-shooting took place yesterday.

Four men and three women have been arrested in connection with shootings that left two Louisiana sheriff’s deputies dead and two others wounded, police said Friday.

Their arrests, and the preliminary charges they are facing, follow a pair of allegedly linked shootings early Thursday in LaPlace, a community of about 30,000 people located roughly 25 miles west of New Orleans. . .

St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff Michael Tregre called the slain and wounded deputies “heroes” and described those arrested as “some very violent individuals.”

“The people that (the deputies) lost their lives for, that we have in custody, I believe are some of the most violent, evil people on the planet,” Tregre said Friday.

No lie. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the slain officers’ families, friends and co-workers. I guess conservatives aren’t really that fond of policemen after all, huh? That’s three dead and four wounded in only two weeks. Here are some particulars on this latest batch of headline-grabbing American patriots:

Authorities believe that suspect, Kyle Joekel, 29, may have ties to anti-government groups, in particular a loose organization known as Posse Comitatus that generally doesn’t recognize authority above the level of county sheriff. The name of the group means “power of the county” in Latin, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s website.

Group members refuse to recognize various aspects of federal authority, and some refuse to pay taxes. The group has been associated with citizen militias as well as neo-Nazi organizations.

And . .

“The intelligence information we got is that Terry Lyn Smith is one of those sovereign citizens,” Davidson said. “But these people run together and think together, so it’s likely the others have those leanings, too.”

Davidson said that Smith identified himself as a sovereign citizen last November when he was served with a search warrant by officers in Robertson County, Tenn. That search turned up four rifles, ammunition and handguns, but it wasn’t immediately clear if arrests were made.

Cue the libertarians. Last week, some sovereign fellas messed with cops in Idaho. But they didn’t kill them. The scamps!

I know nothing about these mens’ views, but it seems like they’re not the feared picture of sovereigns who use exactly this sort of banal traffic stop to murder cops. . . Maybe we could all learn a thing or two, if not go full conspiracy wacko, from these sovereign citizens. And their idea to choke bureaucracy to death on its own paperwork is a compelling one.

Sovereign citizens have shot and killed four police officers since May 2010.