AZ representative shot.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011...-public-event/
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One child reported dead.
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AZ representative shot.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011...-public-event/
Edit
One child reported dead.
Don't you mean, "WTF is wrong with THAT person" ?
Not "THESE" people?
Who are you referring to by "THESE" people?
This was the action of a mentally ill person.
He acted alone.
No one made him do anything.
To blame anyone else for the actions of an individual-- a crazy individual-- is ridiculous.
How did an obviously "crazy" person get a hold of a semi-automatic assault weapon?Quote:
Originally Posted by 999969999
I read this awhile back.. It's still in my head. I mean, wow.. 6down. He must be reallycrazytrained for that.
There have been many threats sent to lawmakers, there has been attacks on offices, there has even been an anthrax attack. This incident may just be one person, he may not be connected to any party, group , cause or religion, but it isn't alone. Even if it was just random it's hardly unique. So yes THESE PEOPLE.Quote:
Originally Posted by 999969999
I drive down Elm st. often. I was a still kid in the 60s. I always hoped each generation would be more civil. Lately it seems violence is the preferred choice of making disagreement known.
By your logic, Jodie Foster should have been held responsible for the shooting of Reagan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hinckley,_Jr.
It was Hinckley's fault, not Foster's.
He was a crazy individual who did an insane act.
I don't quite follow. All the other stuff ie the anthrax, the other attacks, and the threats, aren't those acts by crazy people holding the same or similar opinions?
Or is this special because people got killed? Is the other stuff done by a better class of crazy with less wrong in the head?
What the hell are you talking about?Quote:
Originally Posted by 999969999
Aided and abetted by the NRA and all the "defenders of the 2nd Amendment" who believe that gun ownership should be completely unfettered.Quote:
Originally Posted by 999969999
Also enabled by Arizona Governor Brewer who made your state one of three that don't even require a permit for concealed carry of weapons.
Reading the Denver Post website this morning, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the Giffords story with that of a local story about the shooting of three people (one dead) by a sixteen year old.
So, within 24 hours we have an obviously disturbed person (who legally- apparently- purchased a weapon) and a sixteen year old who also managed to obtain a handgun...all due to our insanely lax gun control laws.
So much for the "well regulated militia".
While I'm a gun rights person myself, I do agree that we have a very low bar of safety, competence, training and enforcement. But gun laws, or lack of, are unlikely the reason WHY this occurred.Quote:
Originally Posted by clocker
Despite 9's apparent inside knowledge, we only have speculation so far as to any possible reasons or influences.
It may not be WHY but it's certainly HOW, isn't it?Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
100% of gun crimes involve guns. I'm not defending the ineffectiveness of our laws.
If he hadn't gotten a gun legally he probably would have gotten one on the black market. Europe has very strict gun laws, yet they have gun related crime even massacres every now and then. Admittedly nowhere near the frequency we do.
If he didn't have a gun he might have made an explosive device, who knows? The point being that the weapon itself was not the cause, it was the method.
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/235504/SAR...ARGET-LIST.jpg
-March 24, 2010
:shuriken:
Giffords' opponent in the election, Jesse Kelly, held a campaign event in June where participants were invited to shoot an automatic weapon with the candidate. It was promoted as a chance to "get on target for victory in November help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office".
http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg617/sca...=640&ysize=640
The thing is, as much as the rhetoric has become violent in its nature, we don't yet know if it had any influence on this particular shooter.
Pretty standard NRA propaganda.Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
First line of defense: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Second: "If he didn't get it legally, he'd just get it illegally...so all weapons should be legal".
Third: "If he hadn't used a gun, he'd have built a bomb".
Extension of the logic: "Might as well quit trying to cure cancer...if cancer doesn't kill you, something else will".
If you clear your eyes from your pissey little fit you will notice I specifically saidQuote:
Originally Posted by clocker
andQuote:
I do agree that we have a very low bar of safety, competence, training and enforcement
I do think we have a dangerously unfettered regulations when it comes to gun access. I just don't agree that this shooter committed his crime because of our gun laws.Quote:
I'm not defending the ineffectiveness of our laws.
Journalists urged caution after Ft. Hood, now race to blame Palin after Arizona shootings
TAGS: CNNGabrielle Giffordsjessica yellinsarah palin
Comments (108) Share Print By: Byron York 01/09/11 8:58 AM
Chief Political Correspondent
. On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going "to do good work for God." There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.
Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not "jump to conclusions" about Hasan's motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.
"The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions," said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.
"We cannot jump to conclusions," said CNN's Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. "We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever."
"I'm on Pentagon chat room," said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. "Right now, there's messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam."
The next day, President Obama underscored the rapidly-forming conventional wisdom when he told the country, "I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts." In the days that followed, CNN jouralists and guests repeatedly echoed the president's remarks.
"We can't jump to conclusions," Army Gen. George Casey said on CNN November 8. The next day, political analyst Mark Halperin urged a "transparent" investigation into the shootings "so the American people don't jump to conclusions." And when Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that the Ft. Hood attack was terrorism, CNN's John Roberts was quick to intervene. "Now, President Obama has asked people to be very cautious here and to not jump to conclusions," Roberts said to Hoekstra. "By saying that you believe this is an act of terror, are you jumping to a conclusion?"
Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011. In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18. In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin. Although there is no evidence that Loughner was in any way influenced by Palin, CNN was filled with speculation about the former Alaska governor.
Isn't it interesting how just hours after the shooting, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever to prove his point, the liberal Democrat Sheriff Dupnik jumped immediately to this conclusion:
After reporting that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik had condemned what Dupnik called "the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government," CNN's Wolf Blitzer turned to congressional reporter Jessica Yellin for analysis. The sheriff "singled out some of the political rhetoric, as you point out, in creating the environment that allowed this kind of instance to happen," Yellin told Blitzer. "Even though, as you point out, this suspect is not cooperating with investigators, so we don't know the motive. President Obama also delivered that message, saying it's partly the political rhetoric that led to this. So that's why we want to bring up one of the themes that's burning up the social media right now. On Twitter and Facebook, there is a lot of talk, in particular, about Sarah Palin. As you might recall, back in March of last year, when the health care vote was coming to the floor of the House and this was all heating up, Palin tweeted out a message on Twitter saying 'common sense conservatives, don't retreat -- instead reload.' And she referred folks to her Facebook page. On that Facebook page was a list of Democratic members she was putting in crosshairs, and Gabrielle Giffords was one of those in the crosshairs."
Yellin noted that Palin had "posted a statement on Facebook saying that 'my sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other victims of today's tragic shooting in Arizona. On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families and for peace and justice.'" Yellin continued: "And I should point out that Republican leaders in Washington have said that this is not a partisan issue, this is about violence, as have some tea party groups. But clearly this is a moment to talk about our political rhetoric."
"It certainly is," Blitzer agreed. "But the question is, is there any evidence that the suspected shooter in this particular case was a Sarah Palin fan, read Sarah Palin's website, was a member on Facebook, watched her tweets, or anything like that?"
"None at all," Yellin responded. "And there is no evidence that this was even inspired by rage over health care, broadly. So there is no overt connection between Sarah Palin, health care, and the [shootings]."
Indeed, there is no "overt" or any other sort of connection between Loughner and Palin. If such evidence came to light, it would certainly be news. But without that evidence, and after a brief caveat, the CNN group went back to discussing the theory that Loughner acted out of rage inspired by Palin and other Republicans. Conclusions were jumped to all around.
And it wasn't just CNN. Other media outlets were also filled with speculation about the attack and pronouncements on the state of American political rhetoric. What a markedly different situation from 15 months earlier when, in the face of actual evidence that Maj. Hasan was inspired by Islamist convictions, many media commentators sought to be voices of caution. Where was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?
Rather than chipping away at everbody's Freedom of Speech and the Right to Bear Arms because of the actions of one nut, it would probably be better to look at what happened here.
Jared was a schizophrenic who fell through the cracks of the system. He was kicked out of his college due to mental health issues and ordered to not return until he had a psychiatric evaluation and a letter from the psyhiatrists stating he was not a danger to himself and other students and staff. Why was there no follow up with the Tucson Police Department and Terros (Arizona's mental health agency)?
As these emails prove, these weren't the actions of a political zealot, these were the actions of a psychotic person...
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/...ior-recor.html
Jared Loughner's behavior recorded by college classmate in e-mails
By David A. Fahrenthold
In early June, Lynda Sorenson, 52, had gone back to community college in Tucson in hopes of getting back on the job market. One of her classes was a basic algebra class--and one of her classmates was Jared Loughner, now identified by authorities as the man who killed six people and critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) in a shooting rampage Saturday. Sorenson's e-mails to friends from last summer, provided to the Washington Post, reveal her growing alarm at Loughner's strange and disruptive
behavior in class.
From June 1, the first day of class:
"One day down and nineteen to go. We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today, I'm not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit. The teacher tried to throw him out and he refused to go, so I talked to the teacher afterward. Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon."
From June 10:
"As for me, Thursday means the end to week two of algebra class. It seems to be going by quickly, but then I do have three weeks to go so we'll see how I feel by then. Class isn't dull as we have a seriously disturbed student in the class, and they are trying to figure out how to get rid of him before he does something bad, but on the other hand, until he does something bad, you can't do anything about him. Needless to say, I sit by
the door."
From June 14:
"We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird. I sit by the door with my purse handy. If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast..."
The class's instructor, Ben McGahee, said in an interview Sunday that Loughner had been removed from class in its third or fourth week, because of repeated disruptions.
You jumped to a conclusion with absolutely no evidence with your first post.Quote:
Originally Posted by 999969999
Your post after the one I quoted with the E.mails may very well point to a disturbed mind. What it doesn't rule out is other influences. A disturbed mind can be a political zealot mind as well. The two mixed together are when acts like this one become more likely. We do know so far that the congresswoman was the pre-planned target. I don't know if the rhetoric had anything to do with it, I don't know if it didn't. You seem to have made up your mind.
Who is talking about chipping away at freedom of speech?
BTW I'm still wondering how you connected my earlier post to blaming Jodie Foster for something.
"Jared Loughner is a product of Sheriff Dupnik’s office
with 44 comments
This is the report that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been dreading since the tragic event on Saturday January 8.
The sheriff has been editorializing and politicizing the event since he took the podium to report on the incident. His blaming of radio personalities and bloggers is a pre-emptive strike because Mr. Dupnik knows this tragedy lays at his feet and his office. Six people died on his watch and he could have prevented it. He needs to step up and start apologizing to the families of the victims instead of spinning this event to serve his own political agenda.
Jared Loughner, pronounced by the Sheriff as Lock-ner, saying it was the Polish pronunciation. Of course he meant Scott or Irish but that isn’t the point. The point is he and his office have had previous contact with the alleged assailant in the past and that is how he knows how to pronounce the name.
Jared Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When Pima County Sheriff’s Office was informed, his deputies assured the victims that he was being well managed by the mental health system. It was also suggested that further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it solved as Jared Loughner has a family member that works for Pima County. Amy Loughner is a Natural Resource specialist for the Pima County Parks and Recreation. My sympathies and my heart goes out to her and the rest of Mr. Loughner’s family. This tragedy must be tearing them up inside wondering if they had done the right things in trying to manage Jared’s obvious mental instability.
Every victim of his threats previously must also be wondering if this tragedy could have been prevented if they had been more aggressive in pursuing charges against Mr. Loughner. Perhaps with a felony conviction he would never have been able to lawfully buy the Glock 9mm Model 19 that he used to strike down the lives of six people and decimate 14 more.
This was not an act of politics. This was an act of a mentally disturbed young man hell bent on getting his 15 minutes of infamy. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department was aware of his violent nature and they failed to act appropriately. This tragedy leads right back to Sherriff Dupnik and all the spin in the world is not going to change that fact."
Chipping away at the Freedom of Speech:
"Bob Schieffer: Giffords Shooter Motivated By 'Dangerous, Inflammatory Words'
By Noel Sheppard | January 09, 2011 | 18:36
24 hours after the senseless killings in Tucson, Arizona, liberal media members are still convinced Jared Lee Loughner was somehow motivated by inflammatory comments he recently heard or read.
Despite there still being absolutely no evidence that this is the case, CBS's Bob Schieffer concluded Sunday's "Face the Nation" making the same silly point (video follows with transcript and commentary):
BOB SCHIEFFER, HOST: Finally today, we live, as we were reminded yesterday, in a dangerous, hair-trigger time when tempers always seem near the boiling point and patience seems a lost trait. Democracy’s arguments have never been pretty, but technology has changed the American dialogue. Because we can now know of problems instantly, we expect answers immediately. And when we don’t get them, we let everyone know in no uncertain terms. We scream and shout, hurl charges without proof.
Those on the other side of the argument become not opponents but enemies. Dangerous, inflammatory words are used with no thought of consequence. All is fair if it makes a point. Worse, some make great profit just fanning the flames.
Which wouldn’t amount to much if the words reached only the sane and the rational, but the new technology ensures a larger audience. Those with sick and twisted minds hear us too, and are sometimes inflamed by what the rest of us often discard as hollow and silly rhetoric. And so violence becomes part of the argument.
In an eloquent statement, the new Republican House Speaker John Boehner said yesterday’s attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. But it is much more. It is an attack on each and every one of us and our way of life. If elected officials cannot meet with those who have elected them without fear of being shot, if the rest of us allow such a situation to exist, then we are no longer the America that those who came before us fought and died to protect and defend. We must change the atmosphere in which this happened, and we can begin by remembering that words have consequence. Like all powerful things, they must be used carefully. More and more, we seem to have forgotten that.
In a segment about the meaning of words, Schieffer sure seemed not to understand many.
Exactly what definitive connection has been made to what happened Saturday and dangerous, inflammatory words? As there has yet to be one categorically factual and legally relevant revelation concerning Loughner's real motive, how does Schieffer or anyone else know he was incited by anything anyone said?
As Howard Kurtz observed on Sunday's "Reliable Sources," the man that shot President Reagan in 1981 was trying to impress actress Jodie Foster.
For all we know at this point, Loughner might have been trying to get Lady Gaga's attention. Or maybe he's despondent that Simon Cowell isn't returning to "American Idol."
Either of these possibilities at this point are just as likely as the reasons being offered by America's press the past 24 hours.
But somehow, despite there currently being absolutely nothing that has surfaced regarding what really drove Loughner to this heinous act, media members like Schieffer are convinced it had to be something to do with either a midterm elections strategy by Sarah Palin, or a comment made by a conservative talk show host.
Is this the state of journalism today? And how do these folks complaining about people being "inflamed by what the rest of us often discard as hollow and silly rhetoric" not understand that their wild, unfounded speculations concerning what set Loughner off fall into the very same category?
"We scream and shout, hurl charges without proof." "
You indeed do, Bob.
And with what Americans have witnessed on their television screens since the first shot was fired Saturday morning, folks have to be thinking all of these networks have been suddenly taken over by either the National Enquirer or TMZ.
On second thought, those tabloids would likely have done a far better job of presenting the facts concerning this horrible tragedy than what the so-called serious media have.
With this in mind, to all those using inflammatory rhetoric to discourage inflammatory rhetoric I say, "Physician, heal thyself."
Quote:
"
Hillary Clinton: Loughner Is "An Extremist;" Blames Shootings on "Crazy Voices" That "Get On TV"
Chicken status: Thoroughly fucked.
Allah collected up some particularly good quotes of the day on free speech, incitement, and desperate, blood-libeling Democrats.
Particularly hard-hitting and pointed is this WSJ essay from Glenn Reynolds. This is a serious read-the-whole-thing piece, as I really cannot quote all the cutting parts. It's all cutting.
American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?"
Set aside as inconvenient, apparently. There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.
So as the usual talking heads begin their "have you no decency?" routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel?
...
To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?
I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.
Where is the decency in that?
Let us count this all up. The following people have been alleged, with hope in their black hearts, to be white conservative anti-government types:
1. The DC Sniper. FBI profiling said he was a white man (he wasn't; in fact he wasn't "a man") and the media ran with that. You couldn't miss the fact they desperately wanted him to be white (and Christian), which became particularly obvious when they refused to use his real, chosen, legal name -- John Allen Muhammad -- instead insisting on calling him by his original but no longer legal name, John Allen Williams.
2. The IRS Plane-Bomber. Joseph Stack was alleged to be an "anti-government extremist" (wink, wink) even though he quoted from the Communist Manifesto -- "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" -- and savaged capitalism in his suicide note. How the media played this is clever -- in news reports, they imply, but do not say, he was a Tea Party type ("anti-government extremist"); they don't say he's a Tea Partier so much as they drop the implication and leave that possibility open for the reader to infer. In opinion columns savaging the right for "hate speech," they cite Stack as an example of the consequences of such. They don't make their errors by direct statement, but they continue making the same error, deliberately, by unavoidable implication.
3. The Discovery Channel Shooter. In one bullet point out of 20 or so, he mentioned that he didn't like illegal immigrants filling the USA with additional dirty, carbon-dioxide creating people. The media seized on this and dubbed him an "anti-immigration extremist," overlooking the fact that the other 19 bullet points in his manifesto were all about environmental, not immigration, extremism, and in fact that he didn't just hate illegal immigrants' babies -- he hated human babies, period, and wished to see them all dead.
4. The Times Square Bomber, who, as Reynolds notes, was immediately dubbed a likely Tea Party by the "centrist" Michael Bloomberg.
5. The census worker hanged in the woods with the word "FED" not, in fact, written on him. He was killed, famously, by an anti-government Tea Party type. In fact, the census worker himself was the culprit -- he killed himself. But this story was barely reported after that, so in the minds of a large percentage of the public, he was in fact killed by a Tea Partier. (Note that the media isn't concerned with dispelling all myths -- they really want you to know that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii; but they don't really mind if you continue to believe the census worker was murdered by conservative conspirators.)
6. The Fort Hood shooter -- initial reports were pregnant with insinuation that this had been a poor white fellow, one of the guys John Kerry had said hadn't done well in school, so they went to Iraq, who'd gone off his nut. But more importantly, after the shooter's identity as an extremist Muslim had been outed, the media continued to speculate that it was the horror of war and not Islam which had animated him -- that is, that it was still the policies of the right which had driven him to kill. Chris Matthews infamously suggested that he had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder by proxy -- that he had gone mad from the horrors of war not by experiencing them himself (he was always safely stateside) but from hearing about such horrors from his patients.
Or, given that he would soon be deployed overseas, that he was suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder -- a new psychological condition, minted by Dr. Matthews, postulating that people can go nuts do to the fear that, in the near future, they will be exposed to the horrors of Bush's War Machine.
And now:
7. An atheist (Satanist?) leftist pot-smoking 9/11 truther who apparently became obsessed with Rep. Giffords when she did not sufficiently respond to his concerns about government mind-control by use of grammar-- also, of course, animated by "hate speech" on the right.
Gee, you'd almost start to think there was some kind of Narrative going on here, with the media dead-set on who the Black Hat would turn out to be in every crime and every horror. And even when it's disproven, conclusively, that their patsies of choice were not in fact behind the crime, they continue to insinuate that we were.
Enough. Enough.
Note: You may be wondering when I'm going to do my own apologia on this score. I am aware, such is owed. I'm writing it; but it's a bit long and involved, and I decided I can't finish it during the day when headlines are supposed to come up rat-a-tat-tat, so I've put it aside and will finish it later.
Housekeeping: rdbrewer's been on fire in the headlines and asked, hey, why am I not a coblogger? Well, good question. So welcome him aboard.
And Incidentally... I'd bet money that he isn't a Satanist. That sounds like day-after media sensationalism to me; I bet the "shrine" isn't a shrine. He just likes skulls or something.
I can relate."
What the heck is that? a report or an internet rumor?Quote:
"Jared Loughner is a product of Sheriff Dupnik’s office
How is that chipping away at freedom of speech?Quote:
Chipping away at the Freedom of Speech:
Last post with all the crap in it- So there's speculation, you are guilty of that yourself. What exactly is your point?
"Heightened and "vitriolic" political rhetoric is being blamed by some for the kind of violence that landed Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in intensive care following a mass casualty shooting on Saturday, but others say a blame game is hardly appropriate or useful right now.
Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Dupnik sparked much of the debate during a press conference Saturday evening in which he blamed talk radio and television for a decline in America.
"I think the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what (we) see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised, that this has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in. And I think it's time that we do the soul-searching," the sheriff said.
On Sunday, Dupnik didn't back down.
"I think we're the tombstone of the United States of America," Dupnik said of The Grand Canyon State, which a day earlier he called the “Mecca” of hatred and bigotry. "To try to inflame the public on a daily basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week has impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with."
1 "The sheriff out there in Tucson, I think he's got it right," Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the assistant minority whip, told "Fox News Sunday." "Words do have consequences. And I think that we have to really -- this is nothing new. I've been saying this for a long time now."
"I think the sheriff was right," added Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who appeared on CBS' "Face the Nation."
"Bob, when you and I grew up, we grew up listening to essentially three major news outlets: NBC, ABC, and of course, CBS. We listened to people like Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, and Huntley-Brinkley, and they saw their job as to inform us of the facts and we would make a conclusion," Hoyer said. "Far too many broadcasts now and so many outlets have the intent of inciting, and inciting people to opposition, to anger, to thinking the other side is less than moral. And I think that is a context in which somebody who is mentally unbalanced can somehow feel justified in taking this kind of action. And I think we need to all take cognizance of that and be aware that what we say can, in fact, have consequences."
Others suggested that the shooting that left six dead and 14 wounded is a one-off that can't be attributed to any logical explanation or current events.
"Our politics takes place in the halls of Congress and at the ballot box. It doesn't happen at a barrel of a gun. This is clearly an isolated incident," Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, told Fox News.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., who appeared with Clyburn, said she is not aware that alleged shooter Jared Lee Loughner is tied to a political movement or engaged in a politically motivated act.
"You know, his favorite books are 'the Communist Manifesto' and 'Mein Kampf.' I think it's important that we recognize that this is an individual that had -- that has mental challenges, and we need to act appropriately in dealing with him and making sure that justice prevails here," she said.
Still, blame seems to be pouring out from all kinds of sources. FBI Director Robert Mueller said in a Sunday press conference that the "ubiquitous nature of the Internet" has made hateful information "much more readily available to individuals than it was eight or 10 or 15 years ago and that absolutely presents a challenge to us particularly as it relates to lone wolfs."
Mueller added that investigators are looking through Loughner's computer for indications of possible motives.
After news broke Saturday about the shooting, Republican Sarah Palin issued a statement offering "sincere condolences" to Giffords and other victims and said her family was praying for peace and justice.
But on Sunday, ABC reporter Dan Harris interviewed Facebook consumer marketing director Randi Zuckerberg, who said the top question being asked on Facebook is whether Palin is to blame for the violence. During the election season, Palin had written a post that used crosshairs on districts in a visualization congressional districts targeted for Republican takeover. In 2004, Democrats used bullseye targets in a similar appeal.
A Palin aide told USA Today that the sights used on the election map were not meant to represent the sights of a gun, and any suggestion otherwise is the work of political flame-throwers.
"This is a terrible politicization of a tragedy," former Palin aide Rebecca Monsour told the newspaper. "We don't know (the shooter's) motive. It doesn't seem like he was motivated by a political ideology. Craziness is not an ideology."
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who appeared Sunday on CNN, said it's the responsibility of those in public life and the media to "try to bring down the rhetoric."
"The phrase, 'Don't retreat; reload,' putting crosshairs on congressional districts as targets. These sorts of things, I think, invite the kind of toxic rhetoric that can lead unstable people to believe this is an acceptable response," he said.
Other politicians suggested the Tea Party movement is somehow responsible for the shooting, which elicited a fierce response from Judson Phillips, co-founder of Tea Party Nation, who issued a statement condemning attribution of the tragedy to heated political discourse.
"At a time like this, it is terrible that we do have to think about politics. No matter what the shooter's motivations were, the left is going to blame this on the Tea Party movement. While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died, we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City Bombing. Within the entire political spectrum, there are extremists, both on the left and the right. Violence of this nature should be decried by everyone, and not used for political gain," Phillips said.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., agreed that it's reckless to impute the motives of the shooter to any particular group of Americans who have their own political beliefs.
"What we know about this individual, for example, is that he was reading Karl Marx and reading Hitler ... That's not the profile of a typical Tea Party member and that's the inference that's being made," Alexander told CNN's "State of the Union."
"It's tempting to say this person's actions might have been a result of [another] person's comments, but I think we need to be very careful about imputing any of these actions on someone else," he said.
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., a liberal firebrand, added that it's easy for some people in society not to make a distinction between words and actions, but talking to the shooter will help reveal his true motivations.
"Whatever this young man was responding to or whatever we find out ... one of the most interesting things here is that we have the shooter in custody and he's alive ... we're going to find out an awful lot about what's going on, but we've got to be careful about what we say to each other," McDermott said. "
"Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.) reportedly plans to introduce legislation that would make it a federal crime to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a federal official or member of Congress.
Brady told CNN that he wants federal lawmakers and officials to have the same protections against threat currently provided to the president. His call comes one day after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot, along with 19 other people, at a public event in Tucson. A suspect is currently in custody.
"The president is a federal official," Brady told CNN in a telephone interview. "You can't do it to him; you should not be able to do it to a congressman, senator or federal judge."
Among the six people killed was federal Judge John Roll.
While it is unknown at this time whether the shooting was politically motivated, that has not prevented a vigorous debate about whether heated political rhetoric seen during the healthcare reform debate and during the 2010 campaign is inciting violence.
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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has had to fend off a fresh round of criticism for a map posted on one of her websites targeting 20 congressional districts that voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2008 presidential election but had Democratic members that voted in favor of healthcare reform.
Critics originally took Palin to task for the apparent use of the crosshairs of guns to identify the districts. The controversy re-ignited Saturday after the shooting, since Giffords's district was included on the map.
Brady singled out the map as the type of rhetoric he opposed.
"You can't put bull's-eyes or crosshairs on a United States congressman or a federal official," he said.
However, a Palin spokeswoman denied Sunday that the image was intended to depict gun sights. Palin offered condolences to the Giffords family and other victims of the shooting on her Facebook page Saturday.
"The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high, that we have got to shut this down," Brady said.
"
...Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
About what exactly? Someone's opinion?Quote:
Originally Posted by 999969999
Newsflash. The sheriffs dept. doesn't decide who gets locked up in the loony bin. They can arrest and charge. That's it.
The man made a comment about vitriol being spewed on radio and TV. Seems some on radio and TV are protesting too much.
You keep posting crap and still haven't explained how "By my logic, Jodie Foster should have been held responsible for the shooting of Reagan." and who is chipping away at freedom of speech.
Red flags are flapping
And this is why this nut was upset, not politics, just a schizophrenic question he asked her...
"Mon Jan 10, 9:06 am ET
Friend says Loughner long had a grudge against Giffords
By Liz Goodwin
A close friend of alleged Tucson, Ariz., shooter Jared Loughner tells Mother Jones that he received a voicemail from Loughner hours before the shooting saying, "Hey, man, it's Jared. Me and you had good times. Peace out. Later." The friend immediately suspected Loughner when he heard that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) had been shot.
Loughner, 22, had been angry at Giffords for years and considered her a fake, according to the friend, Bryce Tierney, also 22. Loughner became even angrier when he attended a campaign event and she didn't fully answer his question, Tierney said:
"'He told me that she opened up the floor for questions and he asked a question. The question was, "What is government if words have no meaning?"'
"Giffords' answer, whatever it was, didn't satisfy Loughner. 'He said, "Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question," and I told him, "Dude, no one's going to answer that,"' Tierney recalls. 'Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.'"
According to an FBI affidavit (PDF via the Washington Post), Loughner had a safe containing a form letter from Giffords and handwritten notes that said "I planned ahead" and "My assassination." Another friend told the Wall Street Journal that Loughner may have become fixated on Giffords "because she was the most accessible" politician.
Tierney told Mother Jones that he greeted news of the shooting with a shock of recognition. "When I heard Gabrielle Giffords has been shot, I was like 'Oh my God. ... ' For some reason I felt like I knew. ... I felt like if anyone was going to shoot her, it would be Jared."
Tierney said Loughner had talked about Giffords for years, though not every day.
"I saw his dream journal once. That's the golden piece of evidence. You want to know what goes on in Jared Loughner's mind, there's a dream journal that will tell you everything," he said
"
"One nut"?Quote:
Originally Posted by 999969999
We're the most heavily armed society in the world and have the highest gun death rate in the world.
We have gun massacres all the time...it's neither "unimaginable", "shocking" or isolated...it's the way we live, every day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by clockerPretty standard NRA propaganda.Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
First line of defense: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Second: "If he didn't get it legally, he'd just get it illegally...so all weapons should be legal".
Third: "If he hadn't used a gun, he'd have built a bomb".
Extension of the logic: "Might as well quit trying to cure cancer...if cancer doesn't kill you, something else will".
Quality opposition, there.;)Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
Hi Kev, long time no see.
Still inscrutable as ever I see.
Yes, as ever.Quote:
Originally Posted by clocker
Other things had the upper hand for a while - not quite sorted, yet.
Working on it.
Good, you've been missed.
Thanks.Quote:
Originally Posted by clocker
I think this is an excellent idea, although I don't believe Gohmert has completely thought it through.Quote:
Originally Posted by Huffington Post
It smacks of liberal elitism to restrict weapons access to just Congress members.
This is America after all, and as the NRA likes to say, "Guns make us safer", ergo more guns make us more saferer.
Besides, as Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday, he wishes one additional person had possessed a firearm in Tucson on Saturday, presumably to use on Jared Lee Loughner.
"I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the hands of a responsible person, that's all I have to say," Franks said at a briefing.
It sure would be a shame if that one extra armed person wasn't around in the Capitol if needed, so let's increase the odds that won't happen.
Additionally, in keeping with the conservative agenda, all government health care will be removed from the Wash DC area and no insurance company will be forced by anti-free market laws to cover any results of these new proposals.
All members of Congress, their staff and family members will be encouraged to wear smocks with Palinesque crosshairs...er, surveyors marks on the back, so everyone knows who to protect during a fusillade of bullets.
These new policies will both decrease the deficit and spur job growth.
The problem is that if others draw their guns then confusion sets in as to who the shooter is.Quote:
Originally Posted by clocker
Person 1 is the shooter, person 2 sees the shooter, draws his weapon and fires at person 1. Person 3 doesn't see person 1, he only sees person 2 shooting so he draws his weapon and shoots at person 2. Person 2 being shot at by person 3 returns fire- And so on.
Even well trained military and law enforcement officers can get things wrong during gunfire. The thought of some of the yahoos I know that carry guns playing swat USA- :noes:
Apparently there was someone with a gun at the tail end of this incident. Fortunately he was competent and kept it holstered. http://www.foxnewsinsider.com/2011/0...ady-to-use-it/
I wish that when these folks decided to go on shooting rampages, they at least shot someone worthy of being shot. Like those assholes who protest at soldier funerals. :dry: