Reflections on Tuscon

When I first heard that a gunman had killed six people in Tuscon last weekend, apparently as part of an attempt to assassinate an Arizona congresswoman, I had no intention of writing about it. The early news coverage was spotty, but the initial picture had all the familiar hallmarks of yet another senseless massacre, the kind that happens all too regularly in schools, offices and public places. To me, it was yet another reminder that the world is often a chaotic, tragic place, and that much of human existence is ruled by the random hand of fate. In short, it was not an event I wanted to dwell on.

But the response to the Arizona shootings from the media in general, and from the liberal commentariat in particular, was too polarizing to ignore. Within hours of the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that also resulted in six deaths, prominent left-wing pundits like Paul Krugman of The New York Times were announcing that the shooting was "probably political" (in Krugman's words) and that the shooter was acting on the "violent rhetoric" coming from conservative, anti-Obama politicians.

And even when the narrative of the attacks and the background of the shooter became better known, and when it became apparent that Jared Loughner in fact had no tangible connection to Rush Limbaugh or the Tea Party, or for that matter any discernible political motivations whatsoever, prominent opinion-shapers on the left refused to back peddle, insisting that a "climate of hate" (Krugman again) had somehow impelled Loughner to commit mass murder, even if he had no literal connection to any political movement or figure. In fact, even the mounting evidence that he was in fact mentally deranged has done little to dispel that foggy narrative.

It was a shameful episode: a case of naked political opportunism without the slightest whiff of factual evidence to back up the charge. Hopefully the reputations of those who engaged in the smear will be tarnished accordingly.

But no one needs me to catalog how unjustified the "blame conservatives" campaign was. The Internet is already full of repetitions, so I won't bother arguing what's already been proven, such as the complete lack of political motivation for the shooting evident in the mountain of reporting being done on Jared Loughner, based on his own Internet postings and eyewitness accounts of people who knew him for years. I won't bother demonstrating that the infamous map created by Sarah Palin's political action committee during the 2010 elections showing the Tuscon congressional district under a gunsight's cross hairs is standard election imagery employed by both Republicans and Democrats. I won't catalog the instances of liberal politicians using violent or martial (and harmless) metaphors equivalent to the right-wing "rhetoric" that allegedly led Loughner to kill six people.

I will, however, offer a few brief observations regarding last weekend's killings that I haven't heard elsewhere, and which I think bear noting. Make of them what you will.

The behavior of the Tuscon sheriff coordinating the response to the attack was completely unbecoming for a law enforcement official.

Within days of the shooting, Tuscon Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was neck-deep in the political controversy when he announced that "vitriol" coming from, specifically, Rush Limbaugh had something to do with Loughner's motivation for the shooting. That this particular opinion is stupid and baseless is too obvious to belabor further; but that it was announced by the chief law enforcement officer responsible for responding to the aftermath of the attack is disgusting.

As sheriff, this man's sole, and weighty, responsibility is to determine what happened at Saturday's attack, what laws were broken and by whom. It is one thing for a newspaper columnist to rashly assign blame for a killing for political purposes; it is something else entirely for a police official investigating the attack to do so. That Dupnik, a liberal and an avowed Rachel Maddow fan, couldn't refrain from interjecting his (completely groundless) opinion of the attack in the course of doing his very serious job is indicative that he is unfit for office. It is a reminder that government officials everywhere, whether elected or appointed, exercise considerable influence over the lives of the citizens they're supposed to serve, and that as such, they must be held accountable when they abuse their positions.

Many liberals have become hyper-sensitive to criticism after two years of defending Obama's unpopular legislative agenda.

For many of the left-wing commentators at The New York Times, the Washington Post and other bastions of liberal opinion, Loughner's rampage was just the latest in a growing list of politically tinged acts of violence supposedly fomented by the angry rhetoric emanating from the right. As proof, they invariably trot out the same set of examples to prove their point, including the 2009 murder of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an elderly anti-semite (which I wrote about at the time), the nut who flew a small plane into an IRS building last year, again killing an innocent employee, and not least, the vandalism of Rep. Gifford's Tuscon office last year, during the height of the health care reform drama.

Somehow, these events constitute a pattern of violence motivated by conservative outlets. Yet the pundits connecting the dots never seem to mention that the Holocaust shooter, James von Brun, was a rabid, unbalanced anti-semite, and that anti-semitism plays no discernible role in the conservative opposition to Obama (who is supposed to be a Muslim anyway, according to crypto-conservative conspiracy theorists); that the IRS attacker had a personal feud with the agency over his own taxes and that his rambling manifesto criticized George W. Bush without mention of Obama; or that the petty vandalism at Gifford's office pales in comparison to the bullet fired through Republican Congressman Eric Cantor's office window in Richmond, also during the health care frenzy.

Details, details.

The sad, unsatisfying truth is that a small minority of people commit acts of violence for a whole host of often inscrutable reasons, and innocent people from all parts of society are liable to find themselves in the cross hairs. Attempting to shoehorn these chaotic, often inexplicable crimes into a coherent pattern of politically motivated violence that just happens to impugn your opponents is the tactic of a charlatan who cannot or will not evaluate each episode objectively.

The Arizona shooter is part of the tragedy.

Lost amid all the blame games is the man actually behind the killings, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. Opinion writers of whatever political persuasion tended to give him short shrift when weighing in on what the attack really meant. Sure he was "deranged" or "ill" and his actions were "monstrous," but that's about all we heard about him from the people trying hardest to sum up his actions. Almost all of them wanted to move on the "real" lesson; Loughner himself has been almost a bit actor. (The straight journalists who have documented so much of Loughner's life have, by contrast, unearthed an enormous amount about the man.)

To me, this is perhaps the least-discussed aspect of the attack. While I'm no mental health professional and don't wish to speculate on his condition, it seems apparent from much news coverage that Loughner suffers from some type of mental illness that impelled him to commit murder. According to Internet postings he was deeply paranoid about the government controlling the minds of citizens through "grammar." He sufficiently frightened students and faculty at a local community college with his violent, offputting classroom comments that he was eventually kicked out. He posed weird, dark questions to online forums. He had a history of petty, drug-related brushes with the law. People who knew him for years before Saturday's attack described him as increasingly isolated and angry.

In short, he appears to have had problems that required some sort of treatment. And now it's too late for that, and for him. Whether Loughner is found guilty of first degree murder as a completely sane defendant, or some lesser charge resulting from clinical insanity, his chances of a normal life have been completely destroyed at age 22. Whether he's executed, or imprisoned, or committed to a psychiatric facility, he'll never be part of mainstream society and all its opportunities again.

And after the obvious tragedy of the people he killed and the loss for their families, this strikes me as the real pity of the Tuscon attacks. Judging from his voluminous comments and postings online, Loughner was a deeply unhappy person, burdened by the stigma of rejection by women, by employers, by the Army that wouldn't have him (all on understandable grounds, given his apparent condition). He posted discussion threads on an online gaming forum like "Talk, Talk, Talking about Rejection" and "Does anyone have aggression 24/7?"

It all reads like an ill young person making vague signals that he needed help, in the wrong place, to the wrong people. The right treatment might have gotten his problems under control in time to avoid last weekend's atrocity. That he didn't get that treatment doesn't appear to be anyone's fault; it only compounds the tragedy that took six lives and irreparably wasted a seventh.