My partner Steve at Newshoggers says Crazy Is As Crazy Does. He’s right of course, everything points to Jared Loughner being a paranoid schizophrenic. That doesn’t mean that others don’t have blood on their hands.
- The NRA and the politicians who are too cowardly to stand up to them. Fact – if the Brady Law was still in place Mr Loughner would not have been able to purchase a 30 round magazine. Twenty of those shots that killed and injured people belong to the NRA. I own guns and have no objections to others owning guns but the sole purpose of automatic weapons is to kill a lot of people really fast.
- The modern snake oil salesman like Limbaugh, Palin and Beck who don’t say but imply that gun violence is a legitimate political tool. This relationship is impossible to prove but they have created an atmosphere of hate combined with references to guns. The most damming thing is they have done it for fame and fortune not ideology. There are elected officials like Michele Bachmann who also fit the dangerous snake oil salesman profile.
- The politicians who are afraid to stand up to the snake oil salesman.
- A society that makes it difficult if not impossible for troubled people to receive the help they need – the US health care system.
Yes, Jared Loughner was a mad man – not left or right, liberal or conservative. But he had accomplices.
I suspect this is a symptom of a dying empire, a collapsing society. This was not the first and it will not be the last such incident. The real irony here is that it was Arizona hero Wyatt Earp that instituted gun control to eliminate mayhem:
“In the 10 months before Earp became town marshal for Dodge City, 25 people had been shot and killed in the town and twice as many wounded in saloon brawls and street battles. In the eight months following the establishment of no guns north of the railroad tracks for Dodge City, only two men had been shot and killed in brawls and no one killed by a police officer.” And this was during the time the cattle drives and celebrating cowboys arrived.
Cross posted at Newshoggers