One more point about this argument from Jack Shafer:
Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification—and, yes, violent imagery—is a good thing. Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private. The wicked direction the American debate often takes is not a sign of danger but of freedom. And I'll punch out the lights of anybody who tries to take it away from me.
Like I said before, we should always heed Justice Louis Brandeis' statement that "the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones," not government telling us what to think or say. But I think it's weird to suggest that say, expressing a desire to commit political violence necessarily purges someone of the desire to commit that violence. The religious leaders who called for the death of Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab province in Pakistan, for criticizing Pakistan's blasphemy laws, didn't just blow off steam. They convinced his bodyguard to kill him.
The U.S. is not in that kind of situation--the jockeying for blame is healthy in the sense that neither party wants to be seen as endorsing violence, because there's a broad social consensus that violence as a political tool is illegitimate. But as Noam Schreiber writes, one can suggest people need to chill out with the "blood of patriots and tyrants" talk without calling for government to step in and draw a legal line as to what kinds of political criticism are legitimate. The latter is a terrible idea, but unfortunately some Democratic politicians seem to want to pursue it anyway. The government is the most powerful entity in American life. It can't be illegal to criticize it harshly.
It's really disconcerting that the first reaction so many people have to an incident like this one is that we all need less freedom--although it's worth pointing out that conservatives only seem to think that's a problem when it might actually end up affecting them.
