There's a lot still to be learned about Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged perpetrator of a shooting spree in Arizona yesterday that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically injured, and six people, including a 9-year-old girl and Judge John Roll, dead. Were it not for the heroism of those present at the scene, there might have been even more casualties.
As with any other act of political violence, we have to be mindful of our own reactions. Political violence in the United States has never been more illegitimate. There was a time when a member of Congress could walk into the Senate and beat a political rival senseless and walk away unmolested. The South was once a place of unrestrained terrorist violence conducted with the tacit approval of local authorities. Even when those authorities were brave or responsible enough to press charges, securing guilty verdicts would be difficult because of a local culture willing to accept crimes committed in service to white supremacy. We live in a time where no major political movement would be willing to openly justify such behavior.
This is why, in the aftermath of the incident, both the left and right began placing the blame on the other side. While liberals pointed to the tone or right-wing discourse, conservatives sought to "depoliticize" the incident by pointing to evidence of Loughner's mental illness. But the attempted assassination of a sitting member of Congress is inherently political, and politics is the process by which democracies negotiate the solutions to public problems. Conservatives know this. If the shooter had been a member of a Mexican drug cartel as some conservatives assumed, they would be calling for stricter immigration laws and blaming the White House for lax enforcement. If the shooter had been named "Mohammed," no amount of evidence of mental illness would have persuaded conservatives that Islam wasn't the culprit and that the administration's terrorism policies had failed. Instead, the shooter appears to have lurked on the extremist fringe of right-wing politics, much like Byron Williams and James von Brunn, and so conservatives are calling for a calm and reasoned assessment of the facts. The guilt is individual, rather than collective.
They're right; we should be careful not to let the heat of the moment push us into making rash decisions about how to respond to these kinds of incidents. It just isn't what they would have said had the circumstances been different. But there is some relief to be found in the universality of condemnations -- what would be truly worrying is if Republicans or conservative media figures were justifying Loughner's actions.
