(Updates I & II) Gunman kills six, including Fed judge. Congresswoman in critical condition. AZ Sheriff condemns hateful political rhetoric.

Today Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head along with several others by a gunman at an event at a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona. Right now I’m not going speculate as to the motives of the suspect, who has been described as being in his late teens or early twenties. But it sufficeth to say that given the toxic political atmosphere that has been generated over the last two years, you almost knew something like this was bound to happen.

ps: If I had to guess, I’d say this assassination has something to do with her support for the DREAM Act.

Update I

So much for my theory of an illegal-immigration-related motive for the shooter of Gabrielle Giffords.

It turns out the suspect is a 22 year old named Jared Lee Loughner. This is his YouTube channel. His videos are just slides of text, and an he seems to be big on “conscience dreaming,” whatever that means. Perhaps he means “conscious dreaming,” aka “lucid dreaming,” but who knows. The videos don’t make much sense but there isn’t much there that would have suggested he’d shoot up a Congressperson’s meet-and-greet or hurt anyone in general.

In one of his videos he encourages people to read the Constitution in order “to apprehend all the treasonous laws.” More interesting is this passage, which suggests Loughner is a US Army recruit:

Every United States Military recruit at MEPS [Military Entrance Processing Station] in Phoenix is receiving one mini bible before the tests.

Jared Loughner is a United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix.

Therefore, Jared Loughner is receiving one mini bible before the tests.

I didn’t write a belief on my Army application, and the recruiter on the application wrote: None.

He concludes this video with a slide that reads:

In conclusion, reading the second United States Constitution, [sic] I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications: The government is implying [sic] mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.

No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver!

No I won’t trust in God!

This guy loves syllogisms, though he doesn’t seem to know how to make one properly. The plain truth is that Loughner is either mentally ill or has the intellectual capacity of an eight year old. Either way, I don’t think there is a coherent motive to be gleaned here.

By the way, here are his favorite books according to his YouTube channel:

Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest [sic], Pulp, Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

I wonder if any conservatives will dare seize on the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf listings in here. We’ll see if a person like Glenn Beck is shameless enough to link Loughner’s professed godlessness with Communism and Fascism in the same fell swoop. I’m going to show a little faith in Glenn and say he doesn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, but I wouldn’t be totally shocked if I’m wrong.

Anyway, I’m following this story closely. It will be interesting to see what else about this lunatic comes to light.

Update II

Regarding Loughner’s YouTube claim about being a US Army recruit (see above), it turns out that he did in fact try to enlist, but was rejected.

Police say that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was the primary target of the shooter, believed to be 22 year old Jared Lee Loughner, although authorities are refusing to confirm the name at this point. Also, the authorities are saying Loughner (though, he was not mentioned by name) has a criminal history.

At a press conference, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said he was “not convinced” that the shooter acted alone and that they are currently looking for a “person of interest”—a white male in his fifties—who apparently arrived with the gunman at the Tucson Safeway.

What was most interesting about the press conference wasn’t any information that Dupnik disclosed about the case, but the fact than on at least three separate occasions he editorialized about the “vitriol” in America’s political discourse right now. Of his own state of Arizona he said,

I’d just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately Arizona, I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

And also,

There’s reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think that people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol.

It seems to me that Sheriff Dupnik is under the impression that this “unbalanced” gunman was, on some level, influenced by the toxic political rhetoric that’s been going around in this country. Should it surprise anyone? In a nation of over 300 million people, we can’t be shocked when some whackjob takes seriously rhetoric about needing a revolution in America.

Speaking of vitriol and threats, one of the six dead from today’s shooting is US District Court Judge John Roll. According to the local authorities (who are working with federal agencies on this case), Roll was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

However, like countless other public officials, Roll has been the recipient of numerous death threats. Such was the case when in February 2009 when he ruled that a $32 million lawsuit filed by sixteen illegal immigrants against an Arizona rancher who held them at gunpoint after he caught them trying to cross the US-Mexico border via his property. In July 2009 the Arizona Republic noted,

When Roll ruled the case could go forward, Gonzales said talk-radio shows cranked up the controversy and spurred audiences into making threats.

In one afternoon, Roll logged more than 200 phone calls. Callers threatened the judge and his family. They posted personal information about Roll online.

“They said, ‘We should kill him. He should be dead,’ “[US Marshal David] Gonzales said.

Roll, who is the chief federal judge in Arizona, said both he and his wife were given a protection detail for about a month.

In addition, several threats had already been made against Giffords, and her Tucson office was vandalized in 2010, hours after she voted in favor of health care reform.

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I leave you with an excerpt from a most salient Associated Press story,

During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords in November, Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon and promoting the event.

“I don’t see the connection,” between the fundraisers featuring weapons and Saturday’s shooting, said John Ellinwood, Kelly's spokesman. “I don't know this person, we cannot find any records that he was associated with the campaign in any way. I just don’t see the connection.

"Arizona is a state where people are firearms owners—this was just a deranged individual,” Ellinwood said.

- Max

max.canning@gmail.com