{"id":3131,"date":"2011-01-09T13:39:18","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T18:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=3131"},"modified":"2011-01-09T14:34:40","modified_gmt":"2011-01-09T19:34:40","slug":"az-shooter-is-a-nutjob-but-violent-rhetoric-still-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2011\/01\/az-shooter-is-a-nutjob-but-violent-rhetoric-still-matters.html","title":{"rendered":"AZ shooter is a nutjob, but violent rhetoric still matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"TakeBackThe20\"<\/a>
Sarah Palin's infamous "crosshairs" map of Congressional targets for 2010<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mere minutes after news broke of the shooting of Rep. Giffords and others in Tuscon the media war was launched to assign blame.\u00a0 The left blamed the right<\/a>, and the right blamed the left<\/a>.\u00a0 As more<\/a> and more facts<\/a> come to light on suspected shooter 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, the only clear picture emerging is that he was mentally unbalanced.<\/p>\n

The shooter’s particular lunacy embodied elements of crazy right-wing, crazy left-wing, Libertarian, Communist, and Nazi fixations.\u00a0 This was mixed with a heavy paranoia about mind control, and an obsession with literacy.\u00a0 It would be difficult to ascribe Loughner’s behavior to his allegiance to any political movement or his influence by any particular pundit or politician.<\/p>\n

Loughner was a disturbed and frightened man looking to blame someone for everything.\u00a0 And that is maybe the whole point.\u00a0 When Sarah Palin says to “reload” in an effort to take back the 20<\/a>, or Sharon Angle suggests the need for “Second Amendment solutions<\/a>” to take back the government, sane people don’t hear that as an explicit call for armed insurrection.\u00a0 They recognize it as charged political rhetoric intended to engage and polarize an audience.\u00a0 But if your mind is a little less balanced… if your predisposition is toward paranoid fear… if you are basically a walking bomb in search of a detonator, then such messages resonate somewhat differently than mere rhetoric.<\/p>\n

The political right has a particular penchant for militant and violent political rhetoric.\u00a0 Their opponents are often positioned as evil and bent on destruction of the country.\u00a0 Labels of communists and fascists, political regimes the country has previously been at war against, are thrown about.\u00a0 Guns are frequently brandished at political events.\u00a0 Even terms such as “death panels” position those with different policy opinions as an existential threat.<\/p>\n

As an exercise, try searching the web for the terms “right wing militia<\/a>” and “left wing militia<\/a>“.\u00a0\u00a0 Alternatively, try “right wing violence<\/a>” and “left wing violence<\/a>“, or choose whatever terms you may like.\u00a0 In all the cases, note the discrepancy of article types and images returned.\u00a0 It’s not that the left is less fervent or politically active, but the results suggest a significantly lower affinity on the left for militarism, guns, and violence.<\/p>\n

We may never know exactly what set Loughner on the tragic path that led him to shoot Giffords and kill six others, including a federal judge and a 9-year old girl.\u00a0 As Glenn Beck has reminded us<\/a> before, these happenings are each the act of a “nutjob”.\u00a0 Granted.\u00a0 But it would be naive to assume that nutjobs are immune to the influence of violent rhetoric.\u00a0 On the contrary, they are likely the most gullible, malleable, and primed to be incited to violent action.<\/p>\n

Perhaps your words don’t make you criminally negligent… but they still matter.\u00a0 Choose them wisely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If your mind is a little less balanced, if you’re a walking bomb in search of a detonator, then violent messages resonate differently than mere rhetoric. Words matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14,15,91,90],"class_list":["post-3131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-sarah-palin","tag-tea-party","tag-violent-rhetoric","tag-words-matter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3131"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3140,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions\/3140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}