This video from the USA says about itself:
Gabrielle Giffords talks the increasing violence back in 2010, before the Tucson Massacre
On January 8, 2011, U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others were shot during a constituent meeting held in a supermarket parking lot in Casas Adobes, Arizona, in the Tucson metropolitan area. Six people died, including Arizona District Court Chief Judge John Roll; Gabe Zimmerman, one of Rep. Giffords’ staffers; and a nine-year-old girl, Christina-Taylor Green. Giffords was holding the meeting, called “Congress on Your Corner” in the parking lot of a Safeway store when prosecutors allege Jared Lee Loughner drew a pistol and shot her in the head before proceeding to fire on other people. One additional person was injured in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. News reports identified the target of the attack as Giffords, a Democrat representing Arizona’s 8th congressional district. She was shot through the head at point-blank range, and her medical condition was initially described as “critical”.
There is a cartoon on US Rightist reactions to the Arizona massacre, by Jen Sorensen.
She writes about it in her blog:
What really drives me nuts in the wake of the Giffords shooting is the chorus of voices — mostly on the right — tut-tutting that “we can’t jump to conclusions.” As though they are the source of caution and reason and all things prudent and high-minded. Well, guess what: Your candidates are anything but. I don’t really care whether Loughner is schizo, or what particular bits of tea party propaganda he swallowed or didn’t. If you don’t find the violent language of the right utterly repugnant, then it’s a sign of how far we’ve drifted away from normalcy in this country.
As any anthropologist will tell you, human behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum; we live in a cultural stew, and by all accounts, that stew is a-bubblin‘. Tom Tomorrow linked to a depressing timeline of armed insurrection in America just since 2008. Hint: it’s long.
Sorensen update on this is here.
The Radical Right Responds to the Tucson Shootings: here.
Arizona Union Leader Says Today’s Shooting ‘Has No Place in a Democracy’: here.
William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: “This is not the end of the story, but is just the beginning. The good people of the United States of America, the true patriots, have finally seen you with your media-painted masks ripped off. They have seen what comes to pass when hate, venom, ignorance and violence goes unchecked and unanswered. You have been exposed, and the fact that it took such an unimaginably horrific act for that exposure to take place only increases the fierceness with which you will be answered. You will be repudiated, not with violence, but with the scorn and rejection you so richly deserve. Spin it as you will, scramble all you like. You are found out, and you have nowhere to hide”: here.
Tony Pugh, McClatchy Newspapers: “A 22-year-old man was formally charged Sunday with two counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder in a shooting rampage that killed six people and critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Jared Lee Loughner, of Tucson, Ariz., is in federal custody. He’ll go before a federal magistrate on Monday and could face additional state and federal charges, including domestic terrorism”: here.
Bill Quigley, Truthout: “Question: How does a mentally unstable man who was kicked out of school and had run-ins with the law buy such a serious weapon? The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was a serious weapon – a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine. Some weapons like that were illegal to sell in the US from 1994 to 2004 under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. It is now legal to sell and own them”: here.
Steve Rendall, FAIR: “Bill O’Reilly’s recent ‘joke’ about decapitating Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was only the latest example of a demented Fox News culture that permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against those deemed enemies of the station, its personalities or their worldview. During the cable channel’s 2008 election coverage, in what she later called an attempt at humor, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta linked Osama bin Laden to Barack Obama as people who both should be assassinated: ‘And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could'”: here.
Michael Winship, Truthout: “The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov had a rule: if you show a gun in the first act, by the time the curtain falls, it has to go off. For weeks and months, that gun, the weapon of angry rhetoric and intemperate rabble rousing, has been cocked and loaded in plain view on the American stage; Saturday morning outside a shopping mall in Tucson, Arizona, it went off again and again and again”: here.
The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right: here.
Profiles of the Arizona shooting victims: here.
Jason Leopold, Truthout: “A federal judge Monday sentenced former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to three years in prison for his role in orchestrating a scheme to illegally funnel nearly $200,000 in corporate cash to Texas political candidates in 2002”: here.
Cruise Ship Confession: Top Fox News Executive Admits Lying On-Air About Obama. Eric Hananoki, Media Matters: “In newly uncovered audio, a Fox News executive boasts that he lied repeatedly during the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign when he speculated on-air ‘about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism.’ Speaking in 2009 onboard a pricey Mediterranean cruise sponsored by a right-wing college, Fox Washington managing editor Bill Sammon described his attempts the previous year to link Obama to ‘socialism’ as ‘mischievous speculation.’ Sammon, who is also a Fox News vice president, acknowledged that ‘privately’ he had believed that the socialism allegation was ‘rather far-fetched'”: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
TRUTHOUT’S BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES
It’s not about gun control; it’s about the devastating impact of our gun culture.
As an advocate of gun control, I believe in the strong regulation of lethal weapons. It’s just common sense.
But until we start changing the gun worship of far too many American males, we are going to have a difficult time stopping the ravaging of our society by bullets.
More than 10,000 Americans die in gun homicides each year, a figure that far surpasses any Western nation.
In Arizona, obtaining a gun is about as easy as getting a drink from a water fountain. Arizona gun laws are so lax that firearms stores in the state are a leading supplier to the drug cartels in Mexico, where guns are difficult to legally purchase.
The shooter in the horrific Arizona massacre on Saturday had a legally purchased Glock – that some reports say was converted to an automatic weapon – with a 30 round mega-clip. That means he could shoot almost continuously until his 30 bullet magazine was emptied.
Gail Collins of The New York Times points out that technology increases the lethality of guns over time and the remedy is clearly not to put such killing machines on a pedestal and argue that they are protected by the Second Amendment.
For far too many gun proponents, the Second Amendment has come to mean the right to use a gun against perceived wrongs.
It’s a deadly travesty that won’t end soon, because too many Democrats – and almost all Republicans – don’t want to lose the votes of angry white males.
The result: arming ourselves to the teeth has too often shot down democracy.
Mark Karlin
Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout
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