Congresswoman Murdered in Tuscon

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Perhaps the real issue is not left or right politics but how to identify and deal with people who are a danger to themselves or others without stepping all over their civil rights.

Perhaps the biggest issue of all this:

The Brady Law was not enforced that day.

Politically, he seemed to be an anarchist more than anything else, like a modern day Leon Czolgosz (the assassin of President William McKinley in 1901).

His friends say he was a hard left pot-head.

“This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.”

– John Green, father of nine-year-old Christina Green, who was killed in Saturday’s Tucson shootings.

I don't think we should dignify this guy by calling him a "political aassasin." John Willkes Booth was a political assasin. So was Leon Czolgosz, who murdered McKinley. Even Sirhan Sirhan or Lee Harvey Oswald. These were assasins who killked their targets, but they didn't go on to fire indiscriminately in the crows and destroy the lives of perfectly innocent strangers, for no apparent reason at all. This guy is a terrorist. He not only shot the congresswoma n---for whatever reason -- but he killed a 9 year old girl, a grandmother from New Jersey and other people he had no conceivable beef with. He was reloading a new magazine and would have killed even more when he was subdued by passersby. Depending on whether you believe in the existence of evil, you should call him- A) evil, or B) deranged. Or both. But you shouldn't cloak him with some understandable political motive. Even the shooters at Columbine were overreacting to a lifetime of bullying and deep down inside you might even have a little sympathy for that. But this guy who mowed down innocent strangers simply because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? No. That's beyond the realm of comprehensible human behavior.

Oh no. I live in arizona and are a gun owner, while i dont think its cool that someone or anyone was shot they better not try to change the gun laws. guns are very cool!

seems to me humans have been killing each other over real or imagined crap since the beginning of man (see 2001,a space oddity). it's just easier to do now.....what, something like a 1/4 billion guns in usa now. lot of weapons. gun control laws are useless, just too many guns available.

i hoped after vietnam i would never have another weapon so instantly deadly, but i do now. obtaining a concealed carry permit was way too easy. scary easy.

maybe political arena humans will now stop putting gunsight crosshairs over faces, stop talking about second amendment remedies to political problems, saying we need to 'take out' political opponents.........and this from someone who would not mind seeing all humans leave this wonderful planet and go ?.

I wonder how many critics of the Tea Party rhetoric also spoke out against the "Kill Bush" chants at protests, various instances of hanging Bush in effigy on a noose, and the making of a Hollywood movie that featured Bush being assassinated, etc. My guess is few to none. This is nothing new. The left was just as obnoxious as the right when they weren't in power. Maybe it goes even earlier than that. I'm too young to know.

Remember how Mayor Bloomberg and Katy Couric were blaming the Times Square bombing on the Tea Party before they knew it was a Jihadist attack. Ignorant statements like that or like tying Palin to this just makes people who sympathize with the Tea Party more angry, more bitter, and more alienated. Nevermind that his friends said he was very left leaning (though as insane as he was, his political beliefs in my opinion are likely irrelevant).

By the way, it's interesting to know that at one of the national Tea Party event in DC they had a singer (Jordan Paige) wearing a shirt that said "Arrest Cheney first" while singing songs attacking George Bush. So at least they have vitriol for both sides.

I'm not trying to politicize this. But I believe that there is some inappropriate rhetoric in politics today and for whatever reason most or all of it is coming from one side of the aisle. I don't say this to silence anyone. But I do say it so that people might think a bit before speaking and choose their words more carefully.

And yes, I am talking about the overuse of phrases such as "lock and load" and "crosshairs" when referring to ones political opponents. Yeah, when we are dealing with rational people who can recognize it as rhetoric and take it with an appropriate grain of salt, and who know better, then its no big deal. The problem is that such speech can be heard by everyone, including those who are unstable and who may not have such a good sense of right and wrong. Surely there must be a way for these folks to effectively get their point across without speaking in such a way to be interpreted as a call to violence, even by a very small minority of people because it only takes one person.

If that's what happened here, I won't even begin to speculate. But even if its not what happened here, its entirely conceivable that one day the outgrowth of this sort of rhetoric could be another incident like this one. So even if that's not what happened here, that fact alone would NOT be a valid justification for continuing this sort of rhetoric, or justifying this sort of rhetoric as harmless. The bottom line is that talking this way is irresponsible.

I wonder what kind of conspiracy theories will arise from this?

Like having to do with the new world order in some circles or mind control to the masses to deflect certain conspiracy theories whom believe fact in possibility. Ultimately a conspiracy theory is the attempt to reverse control to insert a point of view to replace another's point of view at times. We can come up with conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories as well. The possabilities are endless in the macro dynamic and I can only concern in conclusion the absolute "fact" in analysis. Patterns can create probabilics but in criminology for instance even probabilics are not absolute fact but potentials.

Countering propaganda with another's extreme propaganda is reverse-propaganda.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/probabilistic