It’s a meme at this point.

Something horrible happens. We start digging into the perpetrator only to find out that federal law enforcement knew about the person. “He was on our radar,” from the feds has become a punchline at this point. Example 1:

It’s sad, yet it’s unfortunately happening an awful lot. And it happened again over the weekend.

The gunman who killed Texas SWAT Officer Jorge Pastore in a shootout that also left two hostages dead was wearing body armor and night vision goggles — and was on the FBI’s terror watchlist, according to reports.

A search warrant for the suspect’s south Austin home — the scene of Saturday’s deadly shootout — unearthed bomb-making materials inside, calling for help from the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team, according to KXAN.

“Cutting instruments, body armor and any tactical gear to include firearms were all said to be worn or used by the suspect,” reads the warrant, which noted that it’s “not uncommon for people with a gun, body armor or night vision to make homemade explosives.”

Neither the suspect nor the dead hostages had been officially identified as of early Wednesday.

However, a local organization called the Round Rock Area Muslims said they were all family members of a “beloved brother” who was well-known in the local community.

They were mom Eman Ahmed El Nemr-Nassar and two of her sons, Ahmed Mohammed Nassar, 35, and Riad Mohamed Nassar, 32, according to a group member’s since-deleted post shared by the Daily Mail.

It was not known which of the two brothers was the shooter — but the FBI had investigated members of the family and had the suspect on the terror watchlist, law enforcement sources told the Mail.

I’m not into conspiracy theories about the feds “activating” sleeper agents who carry out horrific attacks to advance some shadowy agenda. This is the same federal government, ultimately, that couldn’t roll out a website to sell health insurance. I’m just not convinced they could do something like this competently.

Which means the only other reason I can think of for all these people being on the feds radar and still carrying out such an attack is incompetence.

Federal law enforcement has these people on watchlists or “on the radar” meaning they knew about them and either didn’t investigate them or just did a terrible job of it, only to see them go one and kill innocent people.

In this case, two hostages and a SWAT officer, but how many others died at the hands of someone on their radar?

Look, I get it. Any law enforcement agency is going to be comprised of people and people cannot get it right all the time. We’re flawed by design, which means we make mistakes. I’m not going to expect perfection out of anyone.

But this has happened repeatedly over the years and there’s been no accountability for these continued failures so far as I’m aware.

And that’s a problem.

The feds are, at best, dropping the ball on all these killers. The alternative is that the conspiracy theorists are right, but I find incompetence to be far more likely. That’s still not exactly reassuring, though, and it’s well past time that the feds in all its guises is held to account for this.

Especially since these people who are “on the radar” commit horrific crimes that are then used to justify restricting our right to keep and bear arms. It’s why there are conspiracy theories in the first place. Someone needs to dig deeper into how the feds keep dropping this particular ball.

Assuming, of course, these actually are mistakes.