It took less than a day for the Tucson shooting on Jan. 8 to turn into a political battleground. Only hours after the tragedy unfolded, news stations were airing on repeat an interview from last March in which Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D−Ariz.) herself warned that the heated rhetoric of the right could have violent consequences. Sarah Palin was vilified by the liberal blogosphere, and searches for her "crosshairs map" surged on Google and Yahoo search engines.
Republicans immediately took the defensive, arguing that the shooter, Jared Loughner, was a mentally unstable conspiracy theorist and likely schizophrenic who idolized Karl Marx and whose views aligned no more with conservatives than they did with liberals. There is no evidence, they said, that Sarah Palin's or any other Republican's rhetoric influenced Loughner, or that he had even seen the now−infamous map she made in the 2010 midterm elections, which used crosshairs to identify the districts of 20 House Democrats who voted for the health care bill's passage.
In a way, the Republicans are right. Loughner's obsession with Giffords appears to date back to at least 2007, when he attended a "Congress on Your Corner" event, a gathering similar to the one held on Jan. 8. According to a friend of Loughner, he approached Giffords at the 2007 event, asking her, "What is government if words have no meaning?" and was furious at her inability to answer the question satisfactorily.
Loughner is a man more concerned with his own convoluted political ideology than with conventional bipartisan rancor, more concerned with Giffords' participation in a government he believes to be evil and corrupt than with the particulars of her voting record. In all likelihood, no one will ever know what factors contributed to Loughner's descent into violence or whether the rhetoric of either political party played a role, but Republicans are correct that there is no evidence directly linking any politician to the shooting.
But this hardly absolves Sarah Palin or anyone else who uses violent language to score political points, such as Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R−Minn.), who urged fellow Republicans to become "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax," or Jesse Kelly, Giffords' opponent in last year's election, who held an event at a shooting range during the campaign, where he invited supporters to "[h]elp remove Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly." Or Glenn Beck, for that matter, who told viewers last year that in order to stop the Democrats' "communist" agenda, "You're going to have to shoot them in the head."
Where does this kind of pandering to right−wing blood lust leave us? With a room full of armed and angry constituents on one hand and a gravely wounded congresswoman on the other. The fact that no evidence exists to link Kelly's words with Loughner's actions does not mean a serious re−evaluation of the tone of political language in this country is not needed. It is not a stretch to imagine that imagery like Kelly's, Bachmann's or Palin's could potentially drive angry and desperate supporters to acts of violence. We should not wait for that day to make a change.
The recent shooting is only one of many acts of violence that have occurred in the current environment of heightened vitriol. Shortly after health care reform's passage in March, democratic offices around the country became cites of vandalism, including Giffords'.
Sharron Angle, Sen. Harry Reid's (D−Nev.) opponent in last year's election and a prominent Tea Party activist, denounced those who cast blame on her and other Republicans, saying their efforts were no more than a "media ploy." But an analysis of what factors may contribute to acts of political violence in America is not only an inevitable consequence of the Tucson tragedy, but a beneficial one, if it leads politicians to employ less bombastic, less blood−tinged and more level−headed campaigns. Such a change would decrease the odds of assailants targeting political figures and could lead to a more accessible and honest political landscape.
That heated rhetoric may not have played a part in this particular tragedy does not mean we should hesitate to change the nature of our political discourse for the better.
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