Are Right Wingers responible for the massacre in Tuscon?

[I had to revise this after it became clear that Representative Giffords wasn't targeted by the Tuscon shooter because she was a Democrat, probably.]

Republicans like Senator Kyle of Arizona are saying the Tuscon shooter was crazy so Republicans are not responsible. It has nothing to do with politics.

This is the art of plausible deniability. No Republican pol or commentator said "Murder Representative Giffords! Here's where she'll be on Saturday! Go kill her!"

They're right. No one said that. The Right is also right about the shooter being crazy as a bedbug.

Moreover, the Left has had a significant role in letting so many crazy people out among us, and for making it so blasted difficult to get someone institutionalized, and to keep them institutionalized..

Nevertheless, the Right still bears its share of responsibility for the shooter's killing spree in Tuscon, even though it most likely wasn't politically motivated--just as Republican politicians and pundits hotly insist that their share of blame for this incident is exactly zero--that in fact it's the result of Democratic policies if anything other than just random tragedy.

I find this ideological shirking of responsibility to be proof that Republican claims to being the Party of Responsibility are ludicrous. The GOP consistently denies any culpability for anything that goes wrong, from wars to local policies. They claim 100% correctness in all things. Ideologues of every stripe tend to do this, of course, but since the GOP purged itself of most of its moderates, this sort of party tribalism has become rampant.

Let's consider major factors in the Tuscon shooting:

1. Decades ago Republican cost-cutters and Democratic do-gooders closed the insane asylums as part of tearing up the social safety net to save money, and because crazy people are just "differently mentally enabled" and that every single human being can be saved through rational, loving care. That it's not too late for anyone. I call this one a 50-50 split in blame overall.

And remember the Right doesn't believe in mental illness. It's all Good and Evil, and so-called crazy people just decided one day to be evil. Republican DAs always argue against insanity defenses, which is why the prisons have so many nuts incarcerated there--between a quarter and a third by estimates I've seen. The prisons are our new insane asylums, the consequence being that each of them was allowed to harm others before being incarcerated, and none of them are getting treated. Just being made even crazier.

This shooter was plainly crazy. Everyone who was around him knew it. But today you can't have anyone involuntarily committed unless they've already done something horrible. Even then it's hard, and more likely that they'll just go straight into the criminal "justice" system--with the enthusiastic support of the most Republican of government employee organizations: the prison guard unions.

The idea was that local communities would take care of their own nut jobs. This has not happened by and large. The nut jobs are on the street until they do something illegal, then they're in jail. That's what we've got now. Which means a lot of crimes are being committed (including murder) by people who should never have had a chance to do so.

The close-the-nuthouses movement was spurred by abundant abuses in that system, plus the fact that people were sometimes getting relatives committed to get their assets. We threw out the baby with the bathwater, however. We need a national nuthouse system with that thing Republicans hate so much: government oversight and regulation.

Here's how to apportion blame for this one: see who spearheads fixing this problem. I don't know who that will be. The Republicans will have to support spending tax dollars to do this, and the Democrats will have to admit that their do-gooder reforms have failed. If neither side takes the lead in fixing this my 50-50 judgment stands.


2. The Republicans have made sure that nuts like this shooter can get guns easily--and powerful guns at that, with large magazines, whole prime purpose is killing people. The shooter had bought a 9mm Glock with an extra-large magazine. Few hunt game with handguns. I know from personal experience that it's really hard to anything at a distance without a rifle, even if you are a good shot.


Today you can't even track gun ownership--the law prevents it. And you don't need to go through a background check. Just buy at a gun show. A significant percentage of Mexican drug cartel weaponry is bought here and smuggled there because it's so much harder to buy firearms there.

The Republican Party proudly claims responsibility for the current state of our gun laws, and for the fact that this nation is awash in firearms--far more than any other rich country. Maybe more than the rest put together. Yet they ferociously oppose doing anything to track who got what where and when; to make sure nuts can't get guns; to make sure civilians can't get more powerful weapons than beat cops carry.

So here I agree with the GOP: it's 95% responsible for the Tuscon shooter having his Glock.

3. The guy was crazy for sure, but this shooting spree would only have been "senseless" if he'd walked out of his house and started shooting randomly. But he didn't. He bought the firearm he wanted quite a while ago. He didn't just grab a kitchen knife out of the drawer. He planned to attack this conngresswoman, not just anyone. In this case it wasn't about her politics, just as the nut who shot Reagan apparently just wanted to shoot someone famous in order to impress Jodie Foster (who probably doesn't even like guys, as it happens). But in many, many other cases the motivation has been both crazy and political. Ted Kozinsky, the Unabomber, could be described as leftist, meeting at the crazy zenith with beyond far rightist Timothy McVeigh. The Atlanta bomber was another far right milita antigovernment nut.
 
So even when the  reasoning was crazy, it's often political crazy reasoning--not "senseless. "

At the same time I'd prematurely concluded that because the Tuscon shooter targeted a congresswoman that it was a political shooting. It still might have been to some degree, but in this case it seems a lot more crazy and a lot less political. However, he still might have been feeding off the general antigovernment shtick I'll talk about later.

4. The Republican Party has made a science of dancing around just this side of law and logic.
For example, George Bush the Second got the vast majority of his followers to believe Saddam Hussein had had a part in planning 9/11. Yet Bush never said "Saddam Hussein had a part in the 9/11 attack." Instead he just juxtaposed "Saddam Hussein" and "9/11." Whenever he mentioned the one he mentioned the other. And since the average Republican uses associative reasoning instead of analytic reasoning, that was enough to do the trick.

Same here. Sarah Palin uses firearms/hunting metaphors to describe what her followers should do about Democratic politicians. But she was just joking, right?

Try joking about having a bomb while you're in flight on an airliner. Apocalyptic political rhetoric is comparable--comparable to yelling Fire! in a crowded theater.

But you can be sure that even if the line gets redrawn, wherever it is the Republican noise machine will dance right up to it. Because enraged citizens vote more than calm ones, and they vote more reliably as well.

Plus it fits the MO of pickpockets--one member of the team distracts the mark while the other does the actual pocket-picking. But the Republicans one better--it's as if once the mark discovers that his pocket has been picked, he blames the cop who was trying to protect him, and says if only there were fewer cops he'd be "freer."

Genius.

Today the Wall Street Journal published a fiery denunciation of Democratic blame-mongering about this incident, written by law professor and popular conservative pundit Glenn Reynolds.

Both Reynolds and the GOP may think they've won this round since the shooter appears not to have cared that Giffords was a Democrat.

But in defending themselves they have made it out as if no speech of any sort has any effect on anyone's violent behavior. Of course this means they have to stop complaining about anything any Democrat says that might otherwise be considered incitement to violence--and there were some very intemperate remarks made about Bush II by the Left, as we all know. Even including some assassination talk, along with the chimerical claim that no Democrat opposed this--a bit of the creative historymaking Republicans are so fond of, like the stories from his movies that Reagan told as if they'd really happened.

AntiDemocrat speech probably didn't penetrate the Tuscon shooter's scrambled brains, but that's just one data point. Claiming that we don't have to take responsibility for anything we say--all the while calling Democrats' speech libelous (why should they take responsibility for what they say either?)--that's seriously off the wall.

The Army shrink who murdered all those people was obviously affected by Jihadist ranting, just as he was obviously also crazy, though not as dissociated as the Tuscon shooter. Ditto the London bombers, who may have been sane, actually. Many suicide bombers who failed have been analyzed and found sane. But rather crazy or rather sane, people are affected by incitement speech. And Republicans do blame others for incitement speech--as long as it's someone else inciting someone else.

So Professor Reynolds is being a hypocrite. And that's a shame. I'd thought he was one of the reasonable ones. Instead he just helped circle the wagons.


5. The billionaires who bankroll the Far Right have no use for most government services and so regard them as a waste of "their" money; and they actively hate government regulation of their activities. So they've financed a decades-long campaign aimed at getting people to ignore the good government does them and to look at it the same way the billionaires by and large do. And of course the Democratic Party is the Party of Government, so this ire is focused on the Democratic side, because even though the Republicans grow government too, they don't do so in the area of regulating businesses and exposing rich tax cheats.

So the Tea Party attacks on the Representative who got shot by the nut took existing anti-government "hate reservoirs" in the minds of indoctrinated Republicans and aimed it at this representative recently, aided and abetted by national Republican money, because they thought they could defeat her in the last election (which they nearly did). Even though as is true of all Democrats who win in majority-Republican districts, Giffords is a conservative Democrat as well as one who was known for her moderate language.

No one can tell yet whether all this antigovernment ranting lodged in the Tusdcon shooters' poor excuse for a mind somewhere. But it couldn't have helped. And it has formed a part of others' actions--most notably Timothy McVeigh's--which the Republicans also proudly disclaimed any responsibility for. None whatsoever.


Bottom line: Crazy Guy was crazy all right--but far from random. He targeted a politician, and that wasn't random at all. He'd been thinking about her for years. And while the Republican Party didn't shoot Representative Giffords, it tried to put antigovernment ideas in Crazy Guy's head, whether it worked in this case or not, and made it easy for him to get the gun he shot her with, and left him to roam loose on the streets (along with Democratic do-gooders), and reinforced the "Giffords is the cause of all your problems" message day after day after day, being delivered to a mind that was and is incapable of rationally processing information--again, whether the shooter's mind did process that in some way no one knows, but we do know the demonizing rhetoric was certainly out there for anyone to pick up on.

And the fact that the Republicans from top to bottom almost unanimously refuse to accept the slightest smidgen of responsibility for this act means they have no plans to change their gutter tactics.
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And this is the party that proudly and loudly claims sole possession of the moral high ground--and of the principle of taking responsibility for your actions.

Liar, liar, pants on fire.