An Arizonan Tragedy

In an unbelievable act of violence, Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head during a rally with her constituents on Saturday morning. As expected, the political pundits immediately started pointing fingers.

Since she was a Democrat, the left blamed right-wing rhetoric from the likes of Sarah Palin and her political target map which showed a crosshairs icon directly over Rep. Giffords' district. Here's one of many: http://www.nowpublic.com/world/sarah-palin-target-list-reason-jared-lee-loughner-shot-giffords-2745667.html.

Right-wing blogs reported that the shooter was apparently upset at Giffords for voting against progressive Nancy Pelosi as Minority Speaker of the House. Here's the most notable on short research: http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2653556/posts.

The Tea Party, of course, has not emerged unscathed. When asked if his daughter had any enemies, Giffords' father, Spencer Giffords replied, "Yeah, the whole Tea Party." As unfortunate a comment as this may be in my eyes, I am not so callous as to not understand that a grieving father is looking for fault and a place to lay his anger. And the Tea Party in this Arizona district may very well be deserving of this judgment, especially in light of the quite distasteful ad placed by Giffords' Tea Party nemesis, Jesse Kelly: http://yfrog.com/h5p7wp.

However, certain "facts" have emerged which suggest that the shooter was not associated with the Tea Party. (Quotes here are to pay homage to the fact that not only are experts quite early in their investigations, but reliability of sources is rapidly becoming scarce especially from the biased media and politically active bloggers.) As reported by the Huffington Post, listed among Loughner's favorite books are "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf." They are also reporting him as being anti-government. This, and coupled with the realization that there's a distinct lack of information that Loughner himself identified with the Tea Party leads me to believe that there is no concrete connection there.

In fact, the only obvious explanation at this point is made clear in Loughner's own ramblings as shown on his YouTube account and posted by the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/08/jared-lee-loughner-gabrielle-giffords-shooter_n_806243.html.

This man is paranoid, unstable and clearly not grounded in reality. While Palin's target rhetoric is regrettable, its intention was not to incite violence. And while the shooter may have been angry over Giffords lack of support for Nancy Pelosi, there are probably many hardcore Democrats out there who chose to blog, protest, or write Congress to express their disdain.  In either case, shooting her was not a reasonable response by a reasonable personality.

The truth is, this is an emotionally and probably mentally unstable human being who probably decided to do what he did because he is insane and for no other reason.  Assigning political motivation to his criminally insane mind serves no purpose and does not advance any agenda, either left or right.

Until the truth emerges, however, the only appropriate response is to pray.  Pray for Rep. Giffords and the others to recover from their wounds, pray for the families of the deceased and pray for justice to prevail.