Thinking about the Arizona shootings...
By
At this writing, we just don’t know what possessed a 22-year-old kid to wake up on a clear Saturday morning in Tucson, Ariz., grab his Glock 19 9mm handgun, and travel the short distance between his home and infamy.
By all accounts, suspect Jared Loughner is a disturbed young man. His nonsensical Internet ramblings reveal a dangerous, incomprehensible worldview. His former classmates say they were afraid to sit near him at the community college he attended. The mere fact that eyewitnesses say he shot nearly two-dozen people, including a 9-year-old girl – a 9-year-old girl, for heaven’s sake – is all the evidence most of us need to know that Loughner is a sick, violent person.
Should we care about his politics? Did the ranting on the left or the right drive him toward his terrible actions?
Beats me. In the fullness of time, we may learn that his twisted mind further twisted things like the literal crosshairs Sarah Palin put on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ district in campaign material prior to the November election. Loughner reportedly mentions the gold standard in some of his online rants. Perhaps some particularly virulent commentary about current fiscal policy drove him over the edge. I don’t know.
This terrible shooting aside, I do know our country would benefit greatly by turning down the heat a bit on political rhetoric that has grown increasingly personal in recent years. It’s true at the national level, where much commentary on the left and the right is predictably, mind-numbingly outrageous. And it’s been true around here, too, which is why last year we moved to require registration on our own Talkabout Web forum. While we continue to allow anonymous commentary, and sometimes that stuff goes over the top, it is not nearly the toxic environment it was before registration was required.
This country was born of violence. The names of assassins – John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan – are as recognizable as those of our founding fathers. There is nothing new about an American changing the course of history with a gun. Likewise, outrageous political speech is as American as apple pie. It’s a protected right stamped right in our Constitution.
But, regardless of the motives of our latest mass killer, perhaps we would honor the slain by cooling our heads a bit. While we don’t know why Loughner went on a deadly rampage, it does appear that he targeted a U.S. congresswoman. That is a horror that will likely create distance between our elected representatives and the rest of us. It’s a shame. We should work together to close that gap.