One long-running Lithuanian news story leaves me appalled.

Two years ago, after a heavy night of drinking — that is to say, after ingesting enough booze to float a tugboat — a senior off-duty agent with the Lithuanian government’s bodyguard service shot up a night-time watering hole in Vilnius’s Old Town.

In a drunken tantrum, Jonas Paulikas fired seven shots at restaurant staff from close range. Luckily, according to published witness reports, he was so tanked that he missed by a mile and no one was hurt — not even a scratch.

Paulikas had a blood-alcohol level of 3.6, an astronomically high level. It would probably kill an elephant. He, understandably, remembers nothing of the incident.

Nonetheless, you’d think he would have been convicted of attempted murder or, at the very least, attempted manslaughter. But no, medical experts found he had suffered temporary alcohol-induced psychosis — he blacked out, in other words — which, in the eyes of the court, left him in the clear. He walked away a free man.

There were lots of tabloid-ish headlines, but I sensed little moral outrage among Lithuanians at this ludicrous turn of events.

As one local news editor explained to me, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there are still thick traces of Soviet-style thinking among the Lithuanian populace. Paulikas was no ordinary citizen; he had kept the country’s most senior state leaders out of harm’s way.

The man thus hovers above the law a few feet higher than Milda the street-sweeper or Petras the bus driver, and both Milda and Petras know this. They may grumble a bit, but they are basically inured to injustice.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” goes the old adage. Orwell’s famous line from Animal Farm — his critique of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. — is, today, as apt for Paulikas as it is for the court that let him off.

A dollop of indulgence by the court might have been in order, given Paulikas’s services to the state and his spotless record up to the date of the incident, but a dollop is not a get-of-jail-free card for coming within a whisker of killing a bunch of your equals, who would, I’m certain, be rotting in jail for life if the tables were turned.

Paulikas did, it must be said, lose a court battle to keep his job and pension (he was a year shy of retirement, at the tender age of 40).

But the story doesn’t end there. Now, even more shockingly, Paulikas – who clearly believes he is more equal than others – is singing “Gimme back my bullets.” He has petitioned a court to get back his Sig Sauer pistol and two 30-round clips, because, he says, they were part of an award received for honorable service.

Prosecutors, though, say being drunk in public while in possession of a loaded weapon carries a fine and confiscation of his gun.

The case kicked off Sept. 3 in a Vilnius administrative court. I will be appalled, but not surprised, if he gets his gun and bullets back. Stay tuned.

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