The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
America is plunged into mourning and political acrimony
AMERICA, Barack Obama eloquently declared this week, has been shaken from its routine, and forced to look inward. And so it has: in response to the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman from Arizona, Congress cancelled all its scheduled business for the week, including a vote to repeal the president’s health-care reforms, and instead passed a resolution of sympathy for the victims. Mr Obama, along with several cabinet members and congressmen, flew to the scene of the tragedy, Tucson, for a moving memorial service. And the media set aside all other subjects to engage in a frenzy of recrimination.
The attack took place outside a Safeway supermarket where Ms Giffords was holding a public meeting. Six people were killed—an aide to Ms Giffords, a federal judge, a nine-year-old girl and three senior citizens. A further 13 were injured, including Mrs Giffords, who was shot in the head at close range but is likely to survive.
Bystanders overpowered the suspected gunman, Jared Loughner, as he attempted to reload his semi-automatic Glock pistol. He has already been charged in federal court with the murder and attempted murder of the various federal employees caught up in the attack. Further charges may be added, both by the federal authorities and by the state of Arizona.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says that apart from stating that he acted alone, Mr Loughner has not co-operated with their investigation. But they have found papers at his home which appear to make reference to plans to assassinate Ms Giffords. She wrote to him in 2007 after he asked a question at a similar event; he wrote “Die, bitch” on the letter.
The reasons for Mr Loughner’s hatred of Ms Giffords remain obscure, however. He appears to be a loner and conspiracy theorist of a vaguely right-wing variety. He has posted rantings online about the government’s attempts at mind control and the debasement of the dollar. But his politics are hardly consistent: according to his MySpace page he likes both the works of Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx. In one of his videos, an American flag is burned.
Above all, Mr Loughner simply seems disturbed. Staff at a local community college where he studied until last year summoned the police five times in response to his outbursts. A fellow student wrote to a friend at the time that he was the sort of person who would go on a shooting spree. He was eventually suspended pending a psychiatric review that he never took; questions are now being asked about whether he should have been obliged to have one. He was arrested twice in recent years, once for possession of marijuana and once for defacing a road sign. None of this stopped him buying a deadly weapon.
Despite the seeming lack of any coherent political motive for the attack, assorted politicians and pundits argue that the vitriolic tenor of politics in America gives unstable people an excuse to resort to violence. Arizona, says the local sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, has become “the mecca for prejudice and bigotry”. In 2009 a pastor in a small Arizona church caused a stir by telling his congregation that he prayed that Mr Obama would “die and go to hell”. The windows of Ms Giffords’s offices were bashed or shot out after she voted for Mr Obama’s health-care reforms last year.
Ms Giffords’s father, when asked if she had any enemies, replied, “the whole tea party”, referring to the right-wing protest movement that nearly unseated her in November’s election. Outraged bloggers point to a map published online during the campaign that had marked her district and others that the Republicans hoped to wrest from the Democrats with crosshairs. Moreover, they add, Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate and a leading light of the tea-party movement, who heads the campaign outfit in question, often resorts to martial slogans. Mrs Palin dismisses such charges as “blood libel”, arguing that they foster the sort of bitterness their proponents claim to oppose.
Right-wing bloggers, for their part, have unearthed several instances where Democrats used equally violent language on the campaign trail. Mr Obama, for one, once said that if their opponents brought knives to a fight, the Democrats should bring guns. Several Democratic groups, it turns out, used maps very similar to Mrs Palin’s during the election campaign, albeit with bull’s-eyes rather than crosshairs on the seats they were “targeting”. Anyway, Mr Obama himself asserted in his speech at the memorial service that partisan rancour did not cause the killing.
Threats against congressmen do seem to have become more numerous in recent years, although actual attacks remain mercifully rare. The Senate’s sergeant-at-arms says the number of threats reported to him rose markedly in 2010, as the furore over health-care reform reached its climax. Congress is discussing whether police should provide security at all its members’ public events—something that does not happen at the moment. A Democratic congressman plans to introduce a bill that would make it a crime to threaten or incite violence against any federal official.
But most observers pooh-pooh the idea that Congress will do anything to guard against similar incidents in the future. Proposals for stricter gun laws, in particular, seem likely to fall foul of Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms, and the gun lobby’s ferocious defence of it. The only restrictions proposed so far in Congress are modest: barring guns from events involving senior officials, for example, or prohibiting magazines capable of holding more than ten bullets (the one that Mr Loughner is alleged to have used carried 30). But John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House, says he opposes the first measure, and Congress allowed a previous ban on high-capacity magazines to expire in 2004.
Indeed, there is talk, as always after a bloody shooting spree, that the solution is more guns, not fewer. Several members of Congress have said that they will start carrying guns themselves in response to the attack. Arizona already has some of the laxest gun laws in America, allowing guns in bars, for example, as long as the person carrying them is not drinking. Support for stricter gun laws has been in steady decline in America over the past 20 years, according to Gallup, a pollster; a clear majority now opposes any tightening. Even Mrs Giffords herself owns a Glock. America will soon dry its tears, and mass shootings seem sadly likely to continue.
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