Shooter's Motivation Still Unknown

I’m annoyed at the language that’s become accepted about the motivation behind the AZ shootings.  The conclusion has been reached that Loughner’s motivation had nothing to do with political beliefs, or outside influences, whatsoever.  They were the actions of a lone crazy man.  Period.

I’ve heard this said repeatedly this when talking heads are discussing Palin/Beck’s possible impact on the shooter. (For the purposes of this article, we'll lump all the purveyors of violent right wing rhetoric together as "Palin/Beck")  Everyone is very careful now to preface whatever they say with the “fact” that this was just a crazy person acting, apparently, in a vacuum void of any outside influence.

Here’s the reason why the logic behind this narrative drives me nuts:  The idea that Palin/Beck should be blamed for this guy’s actions has been shot down, er, negated, because we don’t currently have enough information to make that case.  Okay, that’s fair.  But, what we also don’t have at this point is enough information to state, for a fact, that Loughner was not influenced by Palin/Beck or that he was not influenced even by his own political beliefs.

No, politics had nothing to do with it.  He’s just a crazy person.  Let’s leave it at that.

But, we’ve yet to hear his statements to the authorities (if he’s even made any).  We haven’t been made privy to all his personal belongings and writings.  What we have heard and seen clearly shows he’s extremely distrustful of "the government”.  And we know he targeted a Democratic Congresswoman.  Knowing these two things alone, how can we say, for a certainty, that the violent tone of the political discourse that exists, particularly coming from those on the Right directed towards those on the Left, had no effect on his actions?

So, while I can agree that we don’t currently have proof linking his actions directly to the violent rhetoric of Palin/Beck, I'm not ready to say that his actions were not influenced by the violent political rhetoric in any way whatsoever.  We just can’t state that as fact yet.

I choose to withhold judgment until I hear what Loughner has to say.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Loves The Little Children (wait, not you)

Image
Jesus loves the little children All the children of the world Red and Yellow, Black and White They are precious in his sight Jesus loves the little children of the world Singing this song is one of my earliest memories from growing up going to Sunday school. It taught me that all of us, no matter what we look like or where we come from, are loved by the God we were gathering to worship twice on Sundays and Wednesday nights.  This song taught me that I should accept those who might look differently than me (which, growing up in a small, whites only town in Indiana, was a rare occurrence, to be sure), because GOD loved them.  That was the point, wasn't it? That if God loved these people, then we should, too? This week we saw a story about the popular, and notoriously anti-LGBTQ, food chain Chick-fil-A and the reaction some on the right had when discovering Chick-fil-A's website included a section on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and that they had "just hired" a...
Read more

Impeach Trump: Now

Image
The Democrats should be moving full speed ahead on impeaching the president. This is the moment where, historically, Democrats have chosen to take the sensible, well-thought out, reactionary way forward, when what was needed was for them to grab ahold of the narrative and shape it to THEIR will. We don’t need to wait and contemplate while hoping the unredacted version of the Mueller Report gets released soon (we’ve seen enough already). What Trump does so well is to set the framing of the narrative. For instance, when he repeatedly made his racist birther claims about President Obama, Trump introduced a frame, a worldview, that included the possibility of Obama not being an American citizen. The narrative within that frame, whether for or against, necessarily included discussion of Obama’s citizenship, a topic we’d never addressed before in reference to a sitting president. It didn’t matter that his birtherism claims weren’t true, they became a part of the narrative, the disc...
Read more

McConnell's Misplaced Historical Precedent

“You have to go back to 1880 to find last time a Senate controlled by a different party from the president confirmed a Supreme Court justice to a vacancy created in the middle of a presidential election,” McConnell said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday morning, turning to historical precedent. This isn’t even an honest point (shocking!). It’s a complete Red Herring. A misdirection. The point isn’t that this particular situation hasn’t happened since 1880, the argument McConnell should be making is to point out ALL the times since 1880 where this exact situation actually presented itself , and then a nomination wasn’t even considered. Just like Merrick Garland wasn't even considered. That would be historical precedent.
Read more