Tragic shooting prompts parade of usual suspects to blame
Emergency personnel attend to a shooting victim outside a shopping center in Tucson, Ariz. on Saturday, where U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and others were shot. (AP Photo/James Palka)
On Saturday a deranged 22-year-old man opened fired in a Tucson parking lot where a congresswoman was meeting constituents. He killed six people and wounded 14, including the congresswoman, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was is in critical condition this morning with a bullet wound to the brain.
Without additional comment, here are some observations about the subsequent reporting. You, of course, may fill in your own predictable comments.
The AP sidebar reporting on the shooter in today’s newspaper says of Jared Loughner:
“On YouTube, Loughner’s profile listed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ among his favorite books. He also included high school English class classics such as ‘To Kill a Mocking¬bird’ and ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ plus children’s works such as Aesop’s fables and ‘The Phantom Tollbooth.’
“In one video, titled ‘America: Your last memory in a terrorist country!,’ a figure in dark clothing and a smiley-face mask burns an American flag in the desert. The soundtrack is a 2001 song by the band Drowning Pool, in which the singer repeatedly shrieks ‘Let the bodies hit the floor!’"
The story quotes an acquaintance saying of Loughner, “He was like a radical against both parties. ... From what I got, it seemed like he didn’t like anybody that was in power.”
None of that is in the AP story currently online today.
The edition of The New York Times delivered in Las Vegas was printed too early to include any accounts of the horrific shooting, but online today the paper has a sidebar on the shooter that includes such reportage as:
“Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence. The fallout seemed to hold the potential to upend the effort by Republicans to keep their agenda front and center in the new Congress and to alter the political narrative in other ways.”
And it included this:
“Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time.”
In a likely reference to Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s mention of potential Second Amendment remedies, the gray lady reported, “Democrats have also pointed out cases where Republican candidates seemed to raise the prospect of armed revolt if Washington did not change its ways.”
