Senseless
Members of the U.S. House are among the most accessible elected officials, and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was more accessible than most. She made literally hundreds of appearances in her Arizona district, a favorite format being “Congress on Your Corner,” where, her office promised, she would field any question on any topic.
About three years ago, one of her constituents, Jared Loughner, asked her, as some of those present remembered it, “What is government if words have no meaning?” Her answer was evidently unsatisfactory because it fed Loughner’s festering obsession with Giffords and a sinister federal government bent on brainwashing and mind control.
On Saturday, police say, Loughner showed up at one of Giffords’ Corner forums and shot the congresswoman in the head at point-blank range. He then allegedly fired randomly into her audience with a 9 mm Glock, killing six people.
Almost immediately, pundits and partisans began linking the shootings to the broader body politic. Giffords, a Democrat, had voted for health-care reform and opposed the state’s new immigration law, both issues of intense controversy. She was, they said, a victim of a toxic political environment fed by overheated and violent rhetoric.
There were plenty of examples. Exhibit A was Sarah Palin’s political map with cross hairs over 20 Democratic congressional districts, including Giffords’. Then there was Palin’s tweet: “Don’t retreat. RELOAD!” And the Tea Party movement did try to oust Giffords from office.
Nasty and abusive politics may make for a satisfying explanation to some, but drawing political and cultural lessons from the shootings fails to accommodate the central fact of the pointless acts: Loughner, it appears, is seriously crazy.
And probably has a drug problem as well.
His classmates knew it – “He was creepy,” said one – and his community college knew it, too, when he was suspended for erratic, irrational behavior.
The Associated Press interviewed Loughner’s acquaintances and reviewed his Internet postings and found “a social outcast with nihilistic, almost indecipherable beliefs steeped in mistrust and paranoia.”
In that sense, Giffords’ shooting was less a political act than delusional madness on the order of the 2007 murders of 32 people at Virginia Tech by an unbalanced student who then committed suicide.
It is probably too much to hope that the Tucson shootings will result in our mental-health laws being recalibrated to be more proactive and preventive and our gun laws becoming such that an individual with no business owning a gun can stroll out of a store with the same-day purchase of a semiautomatic handgun and two extra-capacity magazines.
What Congress can do is resist the temptation to further lock down the Capitol and retreat behind even more armed guards, bollards and chains and metal detectors. Giffords, with her Congress on Your Corner forums, was in our long tradition of openness and accessibility – one that should be preserved, even in the face of incomprehensible violence.
Scripps Howard News Service