Congresswoman battles for life

Congresswoman battles for life after shooting - Yahoo! News

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was battling for her life on Sunday after an assailant shot her in the head and killed six others as she met with constituents in Tucson.

The 40-year-old Democratic lawmaker was in critical condition and doctors were cautiously optimistic she would survive. The suspected gunman was in custody as investigators sought a motive in the rare shooting of a federal lawmaker and looked for a possible accomplice.

The suspect, identified as Jared Lee Loughner, 22, opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol at point-blank range outside a supermarket on Saturday afternoon. He was tackled by two bystanders after the shooting.

Among the dead were a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl. Twelve other people were wounded in the shooting rampage.

 

At first I thought the shooting might be in reaction to the political climate in Arizona, especially with their controversial immigration laws. Now it seems that the shooter was a disaffected, troubled young man. Very sad that 6 people, especially a child, died as a result of his actions.

 

This shooting is representative of how "inflammatory" rhetoric can have effects far beyond its intent. Calling your political opponents the "enemies", placing "crosshairs" over their names on maps, and recommending a "second amendment solution" for politicians you disagree with, and other similar wordings have consequences.

Especially among those in our society who tend to take things "literally", and act on their convictions that they are "doing the right thing". This young man was far from stable mentally, and once stated that his favorite book was Mein Kampf. Go figure.

Goto:

Jared Lee Loughner's Currency Obsession | Mother Jones

 

The wingnuts at the Westboro Baptist Church weigh in on the Arizona shooting; and true to form they see it as God’s decision to silence those who have attacked them.

Goto:

Westboro Baptist Church To Picket Funerals Of Arizona Shooting Victims

And here is another take on the alleged shooter. Why he is still referred to as "alleged" is of course for reasons of legality. He is innocent until proven guilty under the law, however being tackled at the scene with the weapon would seem to be a rather definite indication of his guilt.

Jared Loughner YouTube Videos, MySpace Suggest Alleged Shooter May Have Ties To Hate Group

 

We might give this thing a day or two before we start pointing blame and assigning responsibility. I think we should withhold comment, and judgment, until the victims are in the ground. Until then offering condolences and a recognition of tragic events should be more than appropriate.

 

It now appears that the "second person of interest" is a non-entity as per the shooting, simply a cab driver who took the shooter to the area:

On Sunday, the sheriff's department said that the "person of interest" was the cab driver who took the suspect to the supermarket. He had gone into the Safeway apparently because Loughner had to get change to pay the fare. He is no longer a person of interest, much less a suspect.

Read more: Tragedy in Tucson: What Motivated Giffords' Shooter? - TIME

 

The sad part in all this is that many are trying to make political hay out of it. The Left is rabidly claiming that it was "Right-wing hate..." etc., that caused the shooting with calls for muzzling free speech and gun control. The Right says it was a Left-wing loon doing violence like the Left always does. Neither is the real case but don't try telling them that.

It is looking like this guy was just a disaffected loner who had some serious personal and mental issues to deal with. It also appears that drugs might have had a role too. That hardly makes this some sort of politically motivated disaster.

 

Like all inexplicable events, we try to explain them. T.A. is right too many of us try to make such events fit the preconcieved beliefs we have what ever they may be. One of the horrors of our modern world is that it dosn't allow us the time and space to reflect upon events before we decide what importance they should possess.

 

If the young man had acted without making political and racial statements in the past, you could be right. In that case he might be just a disaffected and unstable young fellow. This isn't however the case.

 

I would like to think that every thougt and word of mine was pure, but I am human and know that if I were suddenly the center of national attention publicly let alone criminally I could find some of the things I have said or perhaps written would impart an impression of me that I would find inaccurate and uncomfortable. As I wrote, blogs, tweets, texts and other forms of modern living encourage and almost compell us to express a opinion without giving it the reflection it deserves. Once you have staked out a position it is sometimes very hard to retrace your path even if you can acknoledge your mistake. If you blog 'I hate XYZ' and then someone responds 'I feel the same way!' you can gather that the opinion/thought has merit it truely fails to possess.

 

Well I suppose if your "mistakes" on blogs or such are not followed up on, or not consistent over years without "retracing" you path these could easily be overlooked. I would hate to think that the positions I held in my own twenties (1970s) would be be those I was going to have as I matured.

I didn't act on my radical ideas at that time, they were just "vented wind", this young man did act on his. There is a major difference. He might be a "bubble off center", but that doesn't excuse his actions in my mind.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- At an event roughly three years ago, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords took a question from Jared Loughner, the man accused of trying to assassinate her and killing six other people. According to two of his high school friends the question was essentially this: "What is government if words have no meaning?"

Loughner was angry about her response - she read the question and had nothing to say.

"He did not like government officials, how they spoke. Like they were just trying to cover up some conspiracy," one friend told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Both friends spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they wanted to avoid the publicity surrounding the case. To them, the question was classic Jared: confrontational, nonlinear and obsessed with how words create reality.

The friends' comments paint a picture bolstered by other former classmates and Loughner's own Internet postings: That of a social outcast with nihilistic, almost indecipherable beliefs steeped in mistrust and paranoia.

"If you call me a terrorist then the argument to call me a terrorist is Ad hominem," the 22-year-old wrote Dec. 15, part of a wide-ranging screed that was posted in video form and ended with this: "What's government if words don't have meaning?"

Goto:

News from The Associated Press

 

Agreed his actions are beyond any ability to overlook or forgive. But as you pointed out that we are men of a certain age who come from a time when our teenage/early manhood opinions were not recorded on the internet. Frankly no one really gave a damn what we thought back then. (possibly a good thing too)

There was a time when each village had only one idiot. But with the internet the idiot in each village can connect with idiot in the next village across the valley and so on. We joke on this forum about "Nazi Zombies in Antartica", but out there in the ether you can find 'evidence' to support any belief or delusion if you look long enough.

Clearly this young man is just not well mentaly. You do not kill indescrimitly to attack someone for their political views.

Unlike the man in question, we had the time and reletive solitude to mature.

 

When it comes down to it, fear mongering is fear mongering, and both sides have made it an art form to stimulate the nuts.

Sure, one can make the case that the caribou barbie's actions insinuated this.

One can also make the case that the gunman who took over the Discovery Channel's building in September because he thought humans were trash and were destroying the planet was inspired by Al Gore and his "scary movie".

Both sides need to watch their mouths!

 

Agreed, there was a good Op Ed piece on this today.

"We don't know what motivated the gunman in Arizona. And until we do, journalists -- even opinion journalists -- should stop playing connect the dots.

It's interesting, and not in a good way, that the same liberals who are so concerned about supposedly hateful conservative speech polluting our national conversation never seemed especially bothered by all the talk about President Bush being a "war criminal" and a "Nazi."

Nor were they especially outraged over the movie "Death of a President," which was about the assassination -- not of some fictional generic president -- but of President George W. Bush specifically. And were my sensitive liberal friends thrown into a tizzy when in June 2008, during the presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama said, "If they [Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"?

Now I'm no Palin fan but I really don't think it fair to blame her for the shootings. It is also funny that while on the one hand they're blaming the shootings on right-wing rhetoric, far left politicians are already using the tragedy to call for tougher gun control laws. Even though "Giffords herself is a long-time gun owner who has described herself as a strong supporter of the Second Amendment." There has also been much made, in the media, of her opponent in the last election, "Jesse Kelly, who was pictured on his campaign website in military gear, holding his automatic weapon."
Well here's the picture in question.


Now the reason he's in military gear with a weapon is because the picture was taken in Iraq. The poster itself notes "Combat Veteran", which is a legitimate point to try to make since Giffords herself was stressing her stands on veterans issues. I think it is unfair for the media to try and attribute other motives to the picture.

The biggest irony is that Gifford's herself was basically a centrist and really believed her duty was to serve her constituants. She wasn't an ideologue or one of the rabid extremists on the far-left or far-right. Let's pray for her recovery and for the other victims and their families.

In 1789, Jefferson had declared, "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." He's a pretty smart guy, personally I think we owe our allegience first to our country as a whole and not to any political party or group.

 

I see and understand why one does not want the pre-mature action of connecting the dots. However, there is a fringe movement that amongst themselves will claim their success amongst themselves in this state and they are not going to admit or advertise this publicly. Their entire tactics are designed to inspire and result in this kind of "internal terrorist" response. They rely on the fact that you are not going to be able to "connect the dots" but this is their cover and if you were to read their material which is pretty much pure "manure" you would understand this is how they plan to be "effective". If you read through some of this manure you will find they rub shoulders with some of the leadership of Arizona Politics. I believe this fringe group might be identified as far right but in reality it is a combining of some far right with some far left "Socialist" thrown in. This Arizona tragedy will be like Timothy McVay viewed the success of his own action. What I hope for is that new politicians gain a better understanding as to what their rhetoric may contribute to, when they carelessly incite the worst amongst us. We do have free speech, if we are in the public specter, can we use it wisely? Or will innocents have to pay the price when the fringe terrorist is triggered? It is easy for all of us to say, "I didn't mean that" when they have gone steps beyond the direction we have pushed them!

 

Innocents will allmost always end up paying when a nutcase steps over the edge. Then there's the question of what triggers them. There's certainly not a conving case that I've seen in this case that it was anything at all predicatable. Indeed in some cases no reasonable curtailment of speach would seem to affect it. Look at John Lennin's murder if you want proof.

 

It really is of little import whether this disturbed young man leans "left or right", his mental state appears to have been influenced by the vitriol of recent politician’s statements. Here is a pretty illuminating (to myself at least) interpretation of his mental condition by an M.D. who specializes in mental illness as a practicing psychiatrist and behavioral analyst for the past thirty years.

This situation and the information coming out about Loughner has caused me to try to understand what could have caused his action, drawing on my 30 years as a clinical psychiatrist and behavioral analyst.

From listening to many suicidal and rageful/violent people and hearing information similar to what we are beginning to learn about Loughner, I believe that four factors may have contributed to his actions. (This is not in any way to excuse his heinous acts, but to gain a better understanding of his psyche so that we might prevent such tragedies in the future).

Prisoner of his own imagination*: When someone is a loner and not regularly in conversation with others, they run the risk of their imagination obscuring their contact with reality. In fact, most people have experienced their imaginations taking over when under stress and lying awake at 3 a.m., unable to fall to asleep or shut their mind off.

Reality-based persecutory fantasies: Much of Loughner's paranoia about government control, etc. is likely delusional, but there is one area where his persecutory beliefs are grounded in reality. When someone acts bizarre and rants and raves in public, they do trigger fearfulness and avoidance in those around them. And if that someone has no awareness or insight that they are triggering such reactions, they will come to perceive that those people who are acting awkwardly are out to get them, when in reality they are out to avoid them.

Loss of executive function: The less one is able to use the reasoning part of their mind and upper brain to do a reality check on their perception and their runaway imagination, the more they become prey to being controlled by their emotional middle brain and "fight or flight" lower brain. A person's lowest and most primitive brain works more according to reflex than to reason, and there is also a tendency to react back at the world at an equal, "eye for an eye" level of intensity to the way they perceive the world has treated them. Therefore, the more Loughner perceived that the world was after him (because in fact the world was indeed trying to avoid him when he acted crazy), the more he felt the need to get back at it in a more massive way than a single, focused murder.

Revenge of the "nobody": In this world, many people suffer from "somebody envy." To many people, being "anybody" can feel like being "nobody." That may explain some of the massive appeal of shows like "American Idol," "Dancing with the Stars," "The Biggest Loser," etc. where "anybodies" get to become "somebodies."

Worse than being a "nobody" is feeling put down and pushed away, as Loughner may have experienced with the multiple rejections in his life. And when people with a disturbed mind such as Loughner feel put down and pushed away, they often find a way to get back in and get even.

Goto:

Mark Goulston, M.D.: Jared Loughner: Understanding the Arizona Shooter from the Inside Out