About That Shooting in Arizona

I've been mulling over how I feel and what to say for a while - and there are many components to this issue that have to be addressed.

First - the willingness of the media and political figures to jump on a bandwagon condemning the Tea Party and the rhetoric from "deranged right wingers" has made me ill over the past few days. Plus, the response from the so called deranged right when it was discovered that the shooter's political affiliation would be categorized as leftist didn't help, either. Tit for tat to the end. The endless arguments over targeting crosshairs being used as graphics on a map strikes me as childish - and again - both sides (Palin and The Daily Kos, lest that be forgotten or ignored) used similar graphics for similar purposes. The meaning of the symbols was to reiterate that focusing (is that a bad word - what if we have a quick "peek through a microscope" graphic? Would that be considered violent?) political organizational efforts more tightly on a particular district represented by someone strategically weak in the coming elections. How that triggers gun owners into climbing up on the nearest high spot to take out all the evil commies at the next gay pride parade is beyond me. The obvious conclusion is projection - the people who really fear the rest of us having guns don't trust themselves with one, thus all of us have to share in that fear. I don't like heights, so all skyscrapers must be torn down and no more new ones be built. Plus, I'd bet the Target store logo has provoked more violence with their old Blue Light Specials than any crosshair graphic on any popular political site ever aspired to achieve.

So, the next issue morphs into gun control. One of the hoary old intrusions into our rights being reconsidered (because it worked so well when it was a law the last time) is the high capacity magazine ban. Tam (of View From the Porch) tweeted this:

"I wanna ban all magazines that hold more than 10 rounds!" because, you know, it's only the 11th victim that bothers me...

If you cannot see the absurdity of a large capacity magazine ban exposed by that simple statement, there is no hope for you - the rhetoric of gun banners has eclipsed any logical thought processes that may have existed in your brain in the past. And, because he says it far more succinctly and better than I could hope - Ric Locke (via Dustbury)

It is you, not I as a responsible gun owner, who demands perpetuation of the “culture of violence” in order to gain your ends. I can get what I want without raising a finger, let alone a firearm, if you and your fellows will just leave me alone. You can’t get what you want without messing with me, with violence, including gun violence actual or threatened, to back it up — and more and more of us are coming to the conclusion that the point of your effort is to make it safer and easier for you and your goons to mess with us. You don’t want to get rid of guns, and you’re a liar for saying you do. What you want is to have all the guns in your own hands and those of the enforcer-goons you hire to do your dirty work.

Just remember, we as conservatives have come from the shadows to defend our rights and keep what is constitutionally ours. We have endured the bigotry of small minds (clinging to religion and guns like we do).  We have mirrored the organizational efforts of the statists in order to be left alone. Conservatives finally got the memo - if we're gonna be left alone, we're gonna have to fight for it. So be it.

One more facet to the gun control issue - Representative Giffords just about owns this debate - if she is able to recover enough to state her opinions on the subject. She will either fan the flames or silence the meddlers. She has supported gun rights in the past. I hope and pray that she recovers the capability to do either one. While her endorsement of gun control of some kind would no doubt be a blow, I think the second amendment community could weather it. However, her continued support of gun rights would certainly pour cold water on the flames being fanned by the political opportunists.

So, how do we stop this from happening in the future? What is the cause, if not guns? Yeah, we can say the assassin could easily obtain other weapons that probably would be far more devastating, unpredictable and unstoppable, but that is a kind of defeatism that won't sit well with most. Clayton Cramer says in his latest Pajama Media column:

When I was young, random acts of mass murder were shocking.  In 1966, Charles Whitman went to the top of a building at the University of Texas and methodically murdered 13 people with a rifle. Such crimes were largely unthinkable until 1984, when James Huberty went into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, and murdered 19 people with a shotgun and an Uzi.  We are not shocked anymore. We are saddened — but the days when gun control advocates could dance in the blood of victims to get another useless gun control law passed are over. Americans are now used to this — and that is the biggest tragedy of all. We just accept this, and don’t ask, “What’s causing this?  Can we fix it?”

snip

What changed? Our mental health system is what changed — a movement towards emptying out mental hospitals and making it difficult to commit someone against his will. This is called deinstitutionalization. This is an idea so theoretically elegant that it has been taking place everywhere.

As they say, read the whole thing. Clayton has been bringing this problem up now for several years, and he maintains a lot of the deinstitutional process was accelerated by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - both the movie and the book by Ken Kesey.

Ken Kesey wrote the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest after taking LSD and going to work at a mental hospital, and the film by that name is not a documentary.

We don't know what the "trigger" was for the gunman, or if there was a Manchurian Candidate style trigger or a series of warped perceptions that led him to his actions. But we do know he was spewing clues like a teapot left on boil too long. Which our hero, Sheriff Dupnik, somehow missed even in the continuous complaints against the gunman. Didn't mean he couldn't pass judgment with absolutely no facts in his initial press conference. He can apparently avoid Freedom of Information requests about his department's avoidance of it's duties with regard to the shooter's mental state, so frequently displayed at school and any place that was unlucky enough to hire him.

Sorry, got caught up in some sniping there. Cramer's point over the years is that both sides of the political coin are responsible for turning out mentally ill patients into the general public, and the unwillingness to corral the fresh crop. It's also clear that the parents were living in a state of denial as well. So, there is plenty of blame to go around as far as letting the killer roam among us. You and me, too, because we are part of the society wearing blinkers on the mental health issue. Until we're willing to tackle the issue rather than the symptoms (like guns or large magazines), we're doomed for repeats.

Moving on to another sharp contrast - the reactions of the President and of Sarah Palin. It's no secret that I detest our President and what he represents. I also appreciate Ms. Palin. Her ability to make progressives' heads spin every time she opens her mouth makes me laugh. She does articulate what we as conservatives feel quite a bit - but she is not a puppeteer controlling the slack jawed marionettes of the right wing as so many seem to believe. I am amused by many of the insults based on her lack of experience and knowledge - especially when contrasted with Teh Won's vast amount time spent voting "present," the ins and outs of foreign policy learned while "community organizing," and his articulate speaking away from a teleprompter. Oh, wait..... 

I can even understand why Sarah Palin reacted as she did after the murderous events in Arizona. She and other right wing pundits were immediately blamed for causing the bloodshed with absolutely no evidence, and said evidence now points to more progressive influence than anything. Apologies for getting it wrong? Not on your life. That is the tolerance and bipartisanship those of us on the right have become accustomed to getting from those on the left. As far as I'm concerned, the "blood libel" video is completely understandable.

Aaand, there are certain little things about the President's speech at the University of Arizona I just can't get behind. First - it was put on by Organizing for America - which is funded by the Democratic National Committee. Non partisan? Are you kidding me? Then there were the t-shirts - I'm sure we've all seen the pictures by now. At first, it was assumed that the OFA bought them, but it's come out that the University actually purchased them, and they had no mention of the President. No matter to me - t-shirts to commemorate a memorial of a slaughter? This is an example of good taste and restraint?

But these are niggles. The important thing is what the President said:

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations – to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we've seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health systems. Much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government. But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.
Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.
So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.

The President certainly rose above politics with those words. He did, in fact, leave quite a bit of rhetoric behind. Whether he manages to stay above the fray in the future is another matter entirely. But, in this moment in time, Barack Obama was Presidential. His words were of truth and healing. In this case, the accolades are apropos.

Like I said, I don't blame Sarah Palin a bit for what she said or how she said it. But - and this is the biggie - she missed an big opportunity here to rise above the fray as the President did. We have a saying out here in flyover country:  "Never rassle with a pig, they like it too much and you'll just get covered in pigshit." Sarah jumped right in there, as we saw.

This mass murder also hit hard because of the target. It wasn't just some random people on the street - this clown went after a member of Congress and managed to get a Federal Judge while he was at it. The idea that this kind of thing can happen to our insulated lawmakers has been a cattle prod firmly applied to their collective butts. Now we are seeing some claim that since they are more special (as public servants) than the rest of us, they deserve laws specifically designed to protect them above all others.  Guess the rest of us only matter on Election Day. Again, searching for a solution by treating the symptoms.

So, this is a very complex problem that application of simplistic solutions won't control.