There has been a lot of talk about the shootings in Tucson last weekend. It’s not the first time the world has been affected by senseless acts like this, and it certainly won’t be the last.
There has been a lot of blame thrown around, the left blames the inflamed partisan rhetoric of the far right, the right says the left is wrong for making it a political issue and we all go on. Both sides of the debate are predictably looking for something they can win the debate with.
In reality did Sarah Palin putting crosshairs (don’t insult my intelligence by saying they could be surveyor marks, we know what they were) on a map cause this? No, of course not. In the wider picture did the ugly political atmosphere that the extremists on either side of the spectrum are creating with their sound bites and negative campaigning cause six people to die in Tucson? Same answer no, but it sure does not help anyone.
There is no easy cause-effect relationship here no matter how hard the talking heads on the left and the right try to convince us there are.
Do these things help, hell no! But crazy has a way of finding something to latch on to and make it’s own. It always has, and it’s only after the event that the media throws their arms up and the politicians move in to score points.
Dressing in a trench coat did not cause Columbine, just dressing up in camouflage had nothing to do with the Hungerford massacre in the UK. In no way is Catcher in the Rye responsible for John Lennon’s death, but that has never stoped people making the cause-effect link when it suits their point of view.
In each of these things, and countless thousands of incidents across the world someone unhinged found something to hold onto, something that they took and ran with. These people are sick, are not getting the help they need and unfortunately what they have to say (go look at what Jared Loughner, the Tucson shooter, had to say on YouTube there are links everywhere) is shockingly close to some of that being spewed by the extremists on talk radio (both left and right).
No one can look at Loughner’s YouTube rants and think “There is a balanced individual”, just as I don’t understand how people listen to some of the commentators out there and think the same thing. The crazies sound awfully close to mainstream some times.
I’m not saying Glen Beck is going to gun someone down, I am saying it makes it more difficult to separate the real crazies from those who play them in the media.
There are people in this world who do incredible good, yet the crazies yells far louder.
I’m going to give the last word to the Pima Country Sheriff Clarence Dupnik: “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”