Assasinations, rhetoric, blame
So everyone is in the “who’s to blame” mode now. On one hand there is the “It was all Palin’s/Beck’s/Limbaugh’s fault” camp, and on the other side there is the “no it was just a deranged lunatic” camp. Can’t the truth be somewhere else. Why do we need a single direct cause for everything. Could it be that he was a lunatic, and could it be a combination of factors? I am sure that the political vitriol is definitely somewhat to blame. That doesn’t mean it is entirely to blame. But if I am insane and all the time on the radio/tv I hear hyperbolic rhetoric about hiltler this stalin this, communist that, reload, death panels, spilling blood, etc… then perhaps I will just be reinforced in thinking that I may be right about the government doing mind control rigging elections and taking away my rights and blood must be spilled. To a deranged person watching some TV shows it might seem as if the hyperbolic nonsense is actually completely mainstream. I mean most of the media seemed to sometimes believe some of the hyperbole was mainstream. During all the “death panels” talk, the media really did make it sound like most of the country thought that the government wants to kill our elderly.
My other point has to do with a czech saying about the “duck that was shot (who you can always hear).” If Palin thinks that the gunsights had absolutely positively nothing to do with what happened, than why did she take them down so quickly. If she topought about it, they would have been taken down right about the time the original controversy arose. She could say “I didn’t mean those to be gunsights, but if people are misrepresenting it that way, I’ll make it something else.” Instead she kept the graphic on in spite. That doesn’t mean that those gunsights did have any effect on the shooting. But it means that Palin knows that a connection can be made. If so many sane people made the connection to gunsights and shooting … why are we thinking that insane people won’t. That doesn’t mean Loughner did, but someone like him might.
Does it matter if Loughner was primarily motivated by right or left violent hyperbolic political rhetoric? If he was or wasn’t doesn’t mean there can’t be somebody else like that. What he proved is that there are people out there that are capable of an act like this. For whatever reason. If there are people that are capable of doing this, why are we egging them on?