Where's common sense in blaming AZ shooting on 'discourse'?

January 18, 2011

Since January 8th, I’ve been watching the talking heads and reading the wisdom of the political pundits, along with every straight news story about the events that day at a Tucson, AZ, grocery store, trying to make sense of why Jared Loughner apparently planned and carried out the shootings that killed six people and wounded 13 more.



Common sense, of course, tells us that there is no understandable explanation, except for what one sick individual was thinking that day.

The one universally happy feeling coming from the Arizona tragedy is the progress toward an amazing recovery that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords seems to make on a daily basis. She may even be rewriting medical science.

But to my amazement, some of our liberal brethren in the media immediately began writing and talking about how “the right”—including conservative columnists and commentators and “talk radio” hosts—was stirring up erratic emotions in Mr. Loughner’s twisted mind with its “hateful rhetoric.”

Baloney! This sentiment comes from the same folks who called Republicans “Nazis”? And who, on the floor of the House of Representatives, labeled the GOP health care plan for old people as “Die Quickly”?

Even worse is that President Obama addressed the nation at a pep rally-style memorial service and lent credence to all this liberal drivel by calling for a “lighter tone” in the nation’s political “discourse.”

At the risk of violating the new rules for political discourse, I must say the political left in this country is, again, showing us how to practice hypocrisy at its best!

My dad used to say that “common sense ain’t named right…cause it ain’t that blankety-blank common.” Only he didn’t say, “blankety-blank.” Every day, I see that there’s more truth in that statement than he ever intended.

Where’s the common sense in blaming the Arizona shooting on anything other than the focused actions of a madman who got his hands on a Glock 9-millimeter? Abraham Lincoln, as president during a great civil war, often talked to those around him about the futility of trying to protect him from an assassin.

He knew that any committed individual with luck and opportunity could not be stopped from killing even a president. He certainly didn’t ask for a lighter tone in the nation’s discourse.

The same left-leaning pundits who want a less strident political tone talk and write about Mr. Loughner’s mental state with adjectives like deranged, erratic, extremely mentally ill and twisted. And they talk about how vulnerable he was, in his state of mind, to high-pitched political rhetoric. Baloney again!

There’s been absolutely no evidence made public about how Mr. Loughner was enamored with or enthralled by any radio or TV program hosted by people like Rush Limbaugh. In fact, other college-age youngsters who claimed to have known him have come forth to say that the shooter had no interest in such media—that he was, in fact, “apolitical.”

Instead of shrill political discourse that there’s no evidence Mr. Loughner was ever exposed to, I wonder which video games and computer games he spent hours a day playing as a youngster? Or which movies he might have drooled through in his hours of leisure? Was wanton violence, which he may have thought was “cool,” the dominant theme he took from our modern media culture?

I remember clearly, 25-30 years ago, trying to keep my own sons from watching even TV cartoons on Saturday mornings. Did no one else see the mindless violence then in having a cartoon cat chasing a pudgy cartoon mouse until he went “splat!” into a wall? The “Gunsmoke” shows I watched as a kid weren’t nearly as violent as those Tom and Jerry cartoons.

I think I could successfully argue that violence such as that depicted by many of our TV shows and movies with graphic computer-generated scenes, like the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” can only serve to lessen the value of an individual human life in the mind of the viewer. Especially if “the viewer” is nuts to begin with.

Ah, there’s the rub! Mr. Loughner is a basket case; at least all the commentators agree on that. The mental condition of practically every political assassin in American history, if you study the individual cases, has been about two sandwiches and a piece of pie short of a full picnic basket.

John Wilkes Booth, who killed Lincoln, was narcissistic and fancied himself an agent of the Confederate government. Yet he might have been the sanest of the lot, because at first, he wanted “only” to kidnap Lincoln as a hostage to “free” the South. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox foiled that plan and pushed Booth over the edge.

This guy in Arizona doesn’t even deserve the glorification of being labeled an assassin. He’s just one of hundreds of thousands in this country walking around with some screws missing. When your nation’s population is over 300 million people, it happens.




Dennis A. Benfield

Hudson