Tragedy in Tucson

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Tragedy in Tucson

The attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman from Arizona, has sparked a fiery debate about the dangers of heated political rhetoric

THE motive for the bloodthirsty attack on Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat embarking on her third term in Congress, remains opaque. The suspected gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, appears to be something of a paranoid, right-wing, anti-government conspiracy-theorist. But his politics are hardly coherent: he is interested, according to his MySpace page, in both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. But his rampage on Saturday outside a supermarket in Tucson, in which a judge, a nine-year-old child, a congressional aide and three senior citizens were killed, and 14 others, including Mrs Giffords, were injured, is already having a political impact.

Eric Cantor, the number two in the Republican hierarchy in the House of Representatives, said that the coming week’s legislative agenda, including the new Republican majority’s much-publicised effort to repeal Barack Obama’s health-care reforms, would be postponed so that Congress could take stock of the shooting. His boss, John Boehner, the new speaker of the House, tried to defuse any partisan tensions over the tragedy, issuing a statement arguing that an attack on any member of Congress constituted an attack on all of them. But several Democrats, including Dick Durbin, the party’s number two in the Senate, have argued that wayward souls might find justification for such appalling acts in the pugnacious rhetoric many politicians use on the campaign trail.

As evidence that the right has gone too far, left-wingers point to a campaign website run by Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, which at the past election had marked congressional seats she hoped the Republicans could wrest from the Democrats with cross-hair symbols, as if in the sights of a gun. They also cite one of Mrs Palin’s gung-ho slogans: “Don’t retreat, reload”. Mrs Giffords herself said of Mrs Palin’s map last year, “When people do that, they’ve got to realise there’s consequences to that.” Mrs Giffords’s father, when asked if her daughter had had any enemies, replied “the whole Tea Party”, referring to the right-wing activists who helped to deliver the Republicans their resounding victory in November’s election, and only narrowly failed to unseat Mrs Giffords herself.

Needless to say, both tea-party activists and their inspiration, Mrs Palin, reject the idea that they somehow contributed to the shooting. Mr Loughner, tea-partiers in Tucson say, has no known ties to any local group. What is more, points out the leader of one national network of tea-party outfits, it is not really clear he agreed with their politics. Mrs Palin, meanwhile, issued a statement of sympathy to the victims; a spokeswoman condemned any attempt to tie her to the massacre as “repulsive”. In other words, the debate about whether partisan rancour had anything to do with the shooting is itself becoming rancourous. Left-wing bloggers talk of the atrocity as a wish come true for the tea-party; right-wing bloggers retort that the left is exploiting the death and injury of innocents for political gain.

It is hard to see any resolute action emerging from this shouting match. America’s protections for free speech—which Mrs Giffords herself helped remind the world of last week when she read out the first amendment to the constitution during the ceremonies surrounding the seating of the new Congress—preclude any legal limits on violent talk. It is testimony to the strength of America’s gun lobby (and another constitutional safeguard) that there has been little talk of any measures to curb gun ownership as a result of the incident. Mrs Palin and a few others may find themselves on the back foot for a few weeks, and may indeed tone down their rhetoric for a spell. But after a spate of hand-wringing, Congress is likely to do little more than strengthen its security arrangements. That will come a little late for Mrs Giffords, who was shot in the head at close range, and remains in critical condition.