To many of us outside the USA it seems that mass shootings are a common occurrence there, and we found it a bit of a surprise that the most recent one, in Tucson Arizona, should achieve such notoriety. Anything which can capture the American media for a week has to be exceptional.
Perhaps a Democratic congresswoman being severely injured has raised the temperature a bit, and it is indeed a time of overheated political debate, as the electorate reconsiders its views on Obama, and mulls over the media successes of the new right Tea Party movement. Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish and in favour of abortion and these two aspects have received a lot of media coverage, largely to no conclusion.
In truth we know very little about the motives of Jared Lee Loughner, who seems, if not deranged, a bit odd, a loner, perhaps the sort of chap you wouldn’t mind knowing but wouldn’t want owning a gun. As to his politics he has said that he is equally interested by the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf (anyone who says either of these books is interesting simply hasn’t read them).
Gun control, or lack of it, is what the foreigners say, and indeed Arizona has some of the laxest gun laws of any state. Loughner’s pistol had an extended magazine, of the sort which would have been illegal in the USA if they hadn’t relaxed the restrictions on assault weapons in 2004. He bought the ammunition in Walmart.
Most non-Americans cannot understand why gun ownership should be called ‘the right to bear arms’, a romantic euphemism which seems to muddy the waters of reality, and why it should be so loosely regulated. I must admit myself, amid brief flashes of understanding, to finding it a bit confusing. The aim of the Second Amendment was to make everyone equal, as a tool against tyranny so it wasn’t just the ruling class which had the guns. Malcolm X’s Black Power Movement raged against gun control, advising its followers to grab a gun before it was only the police which had them. I remember hearing a Texan say he kept a gun in case the Federal Government staged an unconstitutional coup. It is unimagineable that any politician would have the courage to regulate gun ownership. Americans have to live with it.
The current media fad, led by the liberal leaning New York Times, is to blame it on Sarah Palin. It seems that Ms Palin put out publicity on target seats they could win (does the word ‘target’ make you itch for an automatic weapon? Thought not) with these seats marked by the crosshairs of a gun sight. It seems also that one of her favourite phrases is ‘don’t retreat – reload’. The idea that these words might spur even an idiosyncratic young man to homicidal violence seems quite absurd.
But that didn’t stop President Obama, in an otherwise good speech, from suggesting a toning down of the language of politics, a rather cheap de haut en bas dig at his opponents from a politician who is on the ropes (and carries the curse of this blog). Obama has clearly forgotten that he himself said ‘when they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun’.
So it wasn’t the dialectical politics of the last century, or the confrontational politics of this one. It was a young loner raging against the machine. Mr. Loughner who, unlike most protagonists of mass violence, did not manage to end his own life, will go through the judicial process and perhaps be executed. Motives will be attributed and discarded and slowly he will be forgotten.
The lesson which will be drawn from Tucson is that there is no lesson to be drawn.
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