Illinois Representative Mark Kirk had this to say the other day [emphasis added]:
"I think that the decision to raise taxes by 50 percent in Illinois is political suicide," Kirk said of Quinn's proposal to raise the tax rate to 4.5 percent from 3 percent, coupled with an increase in the personal deduction. "I think the people of Illinois are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes by that degree."
Everybody deploys rhetorical hyperbole from time to time. But not everyone is a public official. It's worth reading this chilling piece by Dahlia Lithwick about the ways Americans turn a blind eye to gun violence and its causes:
Richard Poplawski—the Pittsburgh cop killer—was quite clear about what inspired his killing spree. He feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon." (His aunt, Marianne Klimczyk, told reporters that his machine gun, rifles, and handguns were "recreational and for deer hunting.") Jiverly Wong, the Binghamton killer, cheerfully told a co-worker before the election that he'd shoot either Obama or McCain. And Jim David Adkisson left a four-page manifesto explaining precisely why he opened fire inside a Knoxville, Tenn., church last year: "This was a hate crime," he wrote. He simply wanted to kill the "generals" of the liberal movement: "Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate and House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I knew these people were inaccessible to me."
Nobody has taken responsibility for the content of the books, blogs, and news clips that contributed to the paranoid and violent views of these killers. And why would they? Books and newscasts don't kill people. People kill people.
... But how can there be an honest national debate over gun violence if we cannot even acknowledge the connections between people who admonish us to become "armed and dangerous" and a citizen's decision to arm himself and kill? Our annual April shooting sprees have many complicated causes, and no single factor is fully to blame. But it's willful blindness to fail to see any connections between the rising number of guns in America, the decline in gun regulation, and the screaming nightly predictions about the rise of an apocalyptic totalitarian police state. Until we can recognize that these connections exist, there will be more killings in the coming weeks and years.
It's not clear to me that it is possible for their to be legal consequences for this kind of thing -- under "incitement of violence" -- or that there even should be, the sanctity of free speech being pretty inviolable. Setting the bounds of acceptable discourse is a cultural and social challenge. The people who use this kind of rhetoric should not be taken seriously, and they don't belong in a democracy's public debate. When Kirk, or Glenn Beck or Michelle Bachman try to be taken seriously, they need to be reminded that their violent rhetoric could cost lives. Given the partisan divide in our country, unfortunately, the burden for this task falls on their fellow travelers, and it's unlikely that Beck and his ilk will see any consequences. But if there is any similarity between what the right is going through now and what the left went through in the 1970s and 1980s, the next successful national Republican will be one who can distance him or herself from the extremists.
-- Tim Fernholz
