-by The Editors
It took only seconds for a self-appointed assassin armed with a
semiautomatic pistol to shoot Representative Gabrielle Giffords
through the head; to kill US District Court Judge John Roll and five
others; and to wound fourteen more people. It took barely longer than
that for the news of the Tucson shootings to shock a political culture
numbed by war, economic crisis and two years of lock-and-load
rhetoric. On the other hand, even in the Internet age, criminal
investigation and psychiatric examination take time. It's too soon to
know why this lone gunman went on his rampage or whether anyone could
have stopped him. All the early signs point to a deeply disturbed
young man who stalked Giffords and planned her assassination over
months while friends, classmates and teachers expressed growing alarm
at his outbursts and Internet postings.
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Jared Lee Loughner Social Issues Technology Tucson War For all that we
don't know about Jared Lee Loughner, there is a lot we do know about
the circumstances of this shooting. We know Loughner purchased his gun
legally at a sporting goods store. We know that Giffords had already
received well-publicized threats and endured a smashed door for her
vote to support President Obama's healthcare bill and that Judge Roll
had drawn threats for his ruling in a key immigration case. We know,
too, that Giffords's Tea Party–backed opponent, Jesse Kelly, invited
supporters to "shoot a fully automatic M16" to "get on target for
victory"; that Sarah Palin placed Giffords's district in gunsight
cross hairs in campaign ads; that Nevada Senate candidate Sharron
Angle cheerfully proposed "Second Amendment remedies" for political
disagreements. We know that threats to members of Congress increased
dramatically last year.
Republicans, gun activists and Tea Party adherents are trying to put
distance between themselves and the Tucson rampage by pointing to
Loughner's evident mental illness. But Loughner's mental state does
not absolve the lock-and-loaders of responsibility. To the contrary:
it is well established in psychiatric literature that the delusions
experienced by schizophrenics are shaped by the language, images,
resentments and fears that permeate their wider culture in any
particular country or time. Those politicians and pundits inviting or
implying "Second Amendment remedies" for liberal "conspiracies" on
immigration, healthcare, President Obama's citizenship, gun regulation
and on and on are selling a daily dose of eliminationist fantasy to
the angriest and most estranged minds—including those unable to draw a
distinction between gunsight as metaphor and real-life target practice
on politicians.
Conservatives don't usually show such interest in the mentally ill.
From the early 1980s, when President Reagan scrapped funding for
community mental health clinics, through 2008, when most Republicans
tried to kill parity for mental health insurance coverage in the
healthcare bill, conservatives have shaped a system that denies
essential services and discourages intervention when people like
Loughner fall over the edge. Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, former
director of the Michigan Mental Health Department, puts it this way:
"School officials want to protect their communities, so they expel
students without follow-up. We grant these delusional young men
privacy, freedom and civil rights. We do not adequately fund their
care, nor do we compel treatment unless they go way over the line, and
then we use forensic centers, jails and prisons." This crisis is
particularly acute in Arizona, which has a theoretically strong law
allowing for intervention on behalf of citizens at risk but where
escalating budget deficits have reduced intervention to irrelevance.
As Arizona State University's Morrison Institute documented in a
report released just a few weeks ago, since 2008 the state's funding
for mental health services has been cut by 47 percent, with many
programs eliminated altogether, resulting in "thousands of Arizonans
and their families facing either no publicly funded behavioral health
treatment or severely restricted access to such services." (Contrast
that with Giffords, who despite her reputation as a Blue Dog fiscal
conservative not only voted for mental health parity in insurance
coverage but fought for expanded mental healthcare for veterans, and
in her last term in the State Senate was named legislator of the year
by the Arizona Mental Health Association.)
In Tucson, Loughner's apparent mental illness combined fatally with
one of the country's most irresponsibly lax gun laws, driven by a
firearms lobby so powerful that last year Governor Jan Brewer signed a
measure ending the longstanding requirement for a permit to carry
concealed weapons. Here too, Loughner's rampage is only one expression
of a far broader crisis. As Washington Post investigative reporters
Sari Horwitz and James Grimaldi recently documented, Arizona gun shops
are prime sources for the thousands of weapons arming Mexico's drug
cartels. The same ease with which Loughner obtained his weapon and
extended magazine clip is feeding massive violence across the border
just miles from Tucson. Last weekend, Arizona got a taste of what its
guns have long delivered to Mexico, including the assassinations of
judges and elected officials.
To raise these issues does not exploit or politicize the horror in
Tucson. Rather, it recognizes that the political currency of the right
has long made a dangerous world more dangerous: shredding social
safety nets, flooding our country and our neighbors with weapons,
pitting civil rights and progressive social policy against reckless,
I've-got-mine individualism backed up by insistent and violent
paramilitary visions. Jared Lee Loughner appears to be a conspiracy of
one. But the gun in his hand, the language and images he absorbed
daily, even the fact that no institution was prepared to catch him as
he went over the edge—those are a product of political design and
intention nurtured over a generation. There is an opportunity now to
show a different America. That doesn't mean only rejecting gunsight
ads or turning away from threatening campaign rhetoric; it means
leaders from President Obama on down clearly articulating a social
compact, which is the only real route to safety for politicians and
citizens alike.
More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/157730/tragedy-arizona
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
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