Arizona shooting: Adding to our violent history

The politics of blame converged with the politics of hate as Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fought for her life in an Arizona hospital bed Monday.

She surviving being shot in the head by a gunman who pretty much walked right up to her at an event quaintly described as "Congress on the Corner." The bullet passed through her brain. It's a miracle she's alive.

The gunman appears mentally ill by all accounts.

The politics of blame came calling through the thousand voices connecting the gunman's inspiration to the right wing, Sarah Palin and others who they say use violent metaphors and foment and idea that government is the enemy. The issues were raised, the connections made, maybe implicitly, as these newspeople reported, over and over again, there was no evidence the gunman even knew who Sarah Palin was.

But others, the Tuscon sheriff included, described the incident as almost an "inevitable" product of our politics of hate.

Many weighed in on that.

The New York Times conceded that there was no causal link between the politics of hate, Sarah Palin and the gunman, but described the incident as a product of an environment, possibly created by Palin and others.

The Times wrote of the gunman:  "But he is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery. With easy and legal access to semiautomatic weapons like the one used in the parking lot, those already teetering on the edge of sanity can turn a threat into a nightmare"

The Washington Post seemed more reluctant to offer a cause and affect, but had interesting points nonetheless.

From the Post: "The temptation will be, as Arizona and the nation mourn the dead and hope for the recovery of the wounded, to infuse the terrible attack with broader political meaning - to blame the actions of the alleged 22-year-old gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, on a vitriolic political culture laced with violent metaphors and ugly attacks on opponents."

"Maybe. But metaphors don't kill people - guns kill people"

The Post went on to call for reinstating the assault weapons ban that expired under President George W. Bush that would have outlawed the weapon and clip used. Gunman still could have used a smaller clip, which the Post reasons, may have at least "reduced the carnage."



It's troubling to me that we have been reduced to seeing the bright side of an incident as "reducing the carnage."

A column by law professor Glenn Reynolds in The Wall Street Journal blasts the media for making, it seems, any reference whatsoever to Palin, and such implicit blame continues the politics of "blood libel" that the left is decrying.

Says Reynolds "When Democrats use language like this—or even harsher language like Mr. Obama's famous remark, in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"—it's just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate."

When I was a freshman in college, I was required to read a book called "Violence in America" that detailed the many violent episodes in American history, and put forth the thesis that violence is essentially part of our history and has a lot to do with how we govern ourselves today.

It seems we write another chapter in that book with every Oklahoma City bombing, every Virginia Tech shooting and every Arizona assassination attempt.

I'm not sure there's any one person or group to blame, if not all of us, in a way.

Will political leaders think twice about how they describe their opponents or their opposition to the government after the near murder of one of their own?. I hope so.

But it's too bad these tragedies have to be the cause of that kind of reflection.