A Troubled Voice
Jared Loughner's online writings offer possible clues about his motivations, hispsyche
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With the release of the now-omnipresent Pima County Sheriff's Department photo of Jared Loughner, we have an image of the accused shooter in our head.
He has a shaved head. Perhaps he's been beaten up a little bit. He's staring straight ahead, with what looks like a bemused smile.
On the afternoon of Saturday, Jan. 8, when his name started floating around the Internet as the alleged shooter of 19 people—and the murderer of six—the search was on for information about the 22-year-old.
At first, some people thought Loughner might perhaps be a political ideologue of some sort, furious about immigration or maybe socialized health care. But when we pressed play on the collection of YouTube videos under his name, it quickly became clear that Loughner wasn't operating on a stable logical plane.
It's impossible to make sense of what Loughner posted as his "final thoughts." He obsesses over the definition of terms like "terrorism" and "sleepwalking," and spits out streams of numbers that are supposed to be years marking the difference between B.C.E. and A.D.E.
There are some aspects of Loughner's messages that sound familiar. Loughner complained that people in Giffords' Congressional District 8 were not able to speak English. He seemed to want a return to the gold standard.
But then you see Loughner burning an American flag while wearing what appears to be a skirt made out of garbage bags.
It doesn't seem like he was making much of an effort to hide the thoughts that were going through his troubled head. In a posting on a friend's MySpace profile nearly three months ago, he ranted about his now-well-documented problems at Pima Community College, saying to not "be afraid of the stars" and telling a story about a bird on his right shoulder (a bird which is mentioned in the flag-burning video as well).
Source: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-troubled-voice/Content?oid=2471100