Jared Loughner's Glock: Weapon of Mass Destruction | The Nation


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Jared Loughner's Glock: Weapon of Mass Destruction

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Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt

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There’s no telling how far religious exemptions will go under Justice Alito’s ruling.




In a way, sure. For example, there's no evidence that Loughner knew about Sarah Palin's notorious electoral map on which Giffords's district was one of twenty marked with cross hairs. This was a man who disrupted his community college math class by shouting out questions about the end of the world, posted gibberish on YouTube and was fired as an animal-shelter volunteer because he deliberately walked puppies in an area quarantined for parvovirus. But you don't have to be Michel Foucault to understand that mentally ill people express their demons in ways that are culturally—and politically—inflected, and in Arizona that inflection is right-wing antigovernment hysteria. He may never have mentioned Palin (and really, must she always be the center of attention?), but his obsessions—the gold standard, government tyranny through mind control, the "second Constitution"—are familiar themes of far-right patriot movements. Mark Potok, who monitors wing-nut extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center, sees in the jumble of novels on Loughner's MySpace page a theme of the individual against the totalitarian state, with Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto thrown in "as variants of a kind of generalized 'smash the state' attitude." And David Brooks, let's get real: Loughner opened fire on a government event—a Democratic government event—not a shopping mall, a swimming pool or a classroom at Pima County Community College, from which he'd been suspended.

It used to be that after a spectacular killing there would be a lot of hopeful/rueful talk about keeping it from happening again: the media would be full of self-examinations and mea culpas, calls for more tolerance, more civic engagement and better laws. Who hasn't vowed never to be like Kitty Genovese's neighbors? Now right-wingers claim that they are the real victims of the Tucson shooting: Palin has just released a video claiming that attacks on her cross-hairs map are a "blood libel." (Because it's Sarah Palin, one wonders if she even knows that "blood libel" almost always refers to anti-Semitic accusations that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood for ritual purposes.) Rush Limbaugh "jokes" that Loughner has Democrats' "full support" because now they can take away your guns.



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