Month: January 2011

Their faces. Pray for their souls and for their families and loved ones.

Jonathan Cohn evaluates our mental health system:

After a major disaster, like an airliner crash or terrorist incident, we conduct thorough investigations to determine what caused the tragedy and how we might avoid another one like it. This occasion calls for a similar response. We may never know whether a better mental health care system would have averted this massacre. But we can be sure that it would avert some future ones. 

In related commentary, Vaughan Bell says we are often too quick to blame mental illness for violence:

The fact that mental illness is so often used to explain violent acts despite the evidence to the contrary almost certainly flows from how such cases are handled in the media. Numerous studies show that crimes by people with psychiatric problems are over-reported, usually with gross inaccuracies that give a false impression of risk. With this constant misrepresentation, it's not surprising that the public sees mental illness as an easy explanation for heartbreaking events. We haven't yet learned all the details of the tragic shooting in Arizona, but I suspect mental illness will be falsely accused many times over.

A crowd including members of Congress and their staff gather on the East Steps of the House of Representatives for a national moment of silence in honor of the victims of Saturday's mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona January 10, 2011 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Noam Scheiber rebuts Jack Shafer:

A call to cool inflammatory speech can be just that—a call to cool inflammatory speech. It is by no means interchangeable with a call to ban certain words. Shafer is missing the distinction between a rule or a law, on the one hand, and a norm. 

One simple norm is not making a violent threat in words or images that singles out any individual human being. Wage war against abstractions, not people. Is that so outrageous a suggestion?

The propaganda engine of the far right cranks it up.

The NYT reports on a silly piece of legislation:

Representative Bob Brady of Pennsylvania told The Caucus he plans to introduce a bill that would ban symbols like that now-infamous campaign crosshair map.

Mataconis:

There’s only thing that’s worse than heated political rhetoric, and that’s when a government official decides that they want to come along and ban it.

Nothing should be banned. But those politicians who have stoked rhetorical violence should be voted out of office or ruled out of bounds for real responsibility.

 Mistermix at Balloon Juice studies it:

One of the talking points about the Tucson shooting is that the gun used is “just the same as the one police use”, and that’s true – pistol is a common police sidearm. But, police carry it with a 15 shot clip, not the 30+ shot extended magazine pictured here. By the definition of the assault weapon ban, it’s an assault gun with that extended mag.

In Saturday’s shooting, it was only because of the heroic actions of Patricia Maisch, who grabbed the extended magazine from the shooter’s hand, and the lucky break that his next magazine’s spring was defective, that the shooter was limited to 31 shots.

Joyner differs. Remember that Loughner left an image of that extended mag on his MySpace page. He was a very adept gunman, and tried to kill as many innocents as possible.

Mother Jones has an illuminating interview with a friend of Loughner's:

Tierney believes that Loughner was very interested in pushing people's buttons—and that may have been why he listed Hitler's Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books on his YouTube page. (Loughner's mom is Jewish, according to Tierney.) Loughner sometimes approached strangers and would say "weird" things, Tierney recalls. "He would do it because he thought people were below him and he knew they wouldn't know what he was talking about."

And:

Since hearing of the rampage, Tierney has been trying to figure out why Loughner did what he allegedly did. "More chaos, maybe," he says.

"I think the reason he did it was mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what's happening. He wants all of that." Tierney thinks that Loughner's mindset was like the Joker in the most recent Batman movie: "He fucks things up to fuck shit up, there's no rhyme or reason, he wants to watch the world burn. He probably wanted to take everyone out of their monotonous lives: 'Another Saturday, going to go get groceries'—to take people out of these norms that he thought society had trapped us in."

This says it all. Sarah Palin, at the very least, needs to apologize for her tragic misjudgment if she is to remain in public life.

Peter Beinart imagines:

The Giffords shooting doesn’t prove that Sarah Palin has blood on her hands. What it does prove is that when it comes to terrorism, people like Sarah Palin have a serious blind spot. On the political right, and at times even the political center, there is a casual assumption—so taken for granted that it is rarely even spoken—that the only terrorist threat America faces is from jihadist Islam. There was a lot of talk a couple of weeks back, you’ll remember, about a terrorist attack during the holiday season. And there’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about the threat of homegrown terrorists. Well, we’ve just experienced a terrorist attack over the holiday season, and it was indeed homegrown. Had the shooters’ name been Abdul Mohammed, you’d be hearing the familiar drumbeat about the need for profiling and the pathologies of Islam. But since his name was Jared Lee Loughner, he gets called “mentally unstable”; the word “terrorist” rarely comes up. When are we going to acknowledge that good old-fashioned white Americans are every bit as capable of killing civilians for a political cause as people with brown skin who pray to Allah?