A message from Tucson

The Tucson Shootings

Gregory McNamee - January 14th, 2011

I have lived in Tucson, Arizona, for the last 35 years. I voted, three times, for Gabrielle Giffords to represent my district in Congress. I have said hello to her at public events. I sometimes shop at the corner of Ina and Oracle Roads, where the terrible events of January 8, 2011—the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the murders of a federal judge, a nine-year-old girl, and four other Tucsonans—took place.


None of that gives me claim to special insight into those events, except to say this: for the last five days, as I write, my world, and that of all my city, has been turned upside-down. I am heartsick. And, despite wise counsel, not least from President Obama in the moving speech he gave in our city last night, I am angry.

Let us try a thought experiment. Let us suppose that I, a person whom someone without much sense of political nuance would call a leftist, were to run for elected political office. Let us suppose that I spent six months of campaigning calling my opponent a fascist. Let us suppose that I ran advertisements with my opponent’s image underneath the crosshairs of a riflescope. Let us suppose, finally, that I posed with an M16 (or, were I running in South Carolina, an AK-47) rifle in hand.

And let us suppose that I muttered darkly about “Second Amendment remedies” to our political woes, my opponent being, presumably, one of them.

What message would I be sending you?

Let us suppose that all the elements of our thought experiment were in place. Let us suppose that you asked me to explain all the dark talk and imagery of violence, and that I replied that I was merely exercising my First Amendment rights.

Would you be satisfied?

When I was the age of poor murdered Christina-Taylor Green, fast coming up on half a century ago, my teachers would have instructed me that, yes, those expressions lie within First Amendment bounds.

They also would have instructed me that they were fundamentally un-American.

And so they are, though there are those who make them their daily currency.

Sarah Palin is one, but only one, of them. There are many others on whom we can draw for examples, including, looking only locally, the Tea Party Republican who ran against Gabrielle Giffords in the last election, whose campaign web site featured a photograph of him holding a military-issue weapon with the invitation: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”

First Amendment rights, indeed.

Now, the alleged—a word that is more than a nicety of the law under which Americans are supposed to live—killer and would-be political assassin is to all appearances mentally ill.

Furthermore, he appears to have acted on his own.

Yet he has been living, as we all have, in an Arizona brimming with fear and hatred, full of self-styled militiamen certain that the brave men and women of the Border Patrol and National Guard aren’t up to the task of holding back an “invasion” of Hispanics along the border with Mexico, full of small-time politicians for whom the present gun laws are even now too restrictive but who despise the notion of granting public funds for medical support for the mentally ill—or anyone else, for that matter.

Perhaps nowhere in America has the political rhetoric been more toxic than in Arizona in the last couple of years—and not just rhetoric, but action as well. The sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik, was not exaggerating when he called the state a mecca of bigotry and prejudice.

Is Sarah Palin to blame? Rush Limbaugh? Their army of apers in the media, almost all from the right wing?

Directly, no.

Indirectly, yes.

They are not to blame for the shootings. They are responsible, however, for adding more than their fair share of noise to the rancorous atmosphere in which the shootings occurred. They make their considerable livelihoods falsely shouting fire in crowded theaters, then step back in professed wonderment when someone is trampled.

I believe they know it, too, or else they would not be so furiously talking of “blood libel” and proclaiming their own victimhood while scrambling to remove any evidence of past indiscretion—say, electoral maps with crosshairs on them.

I do not need to elaborate here on the poisonous words that they and their followers have contributed to the political discourse; that is all a matter of public record. Suffice it to say that neither Palin nor Limbaugh, to name only two among the most vocal and prominent, has said anything remotely constructive or sympathetic about the events in Tucson.

Indeed, both have indicated that they will do nothing different. Neither accepts a trace of responsibility for poisoning the well. Neither has offered to tone it down. Limbaugh has instead responded with trademark bluster, as when, speaking of the alleged killer’s undeniably demented mug shot, he said, “Wouldn’t you be smiling, too, if you had the entire Democrat Party running interference for you?”

I suppose that I should not have expected anything different, but even so, you would have to search very hard to find words more infinitely callow.

Others bear as great a responsibility, though. The National Rifle Association has devoted itself in the last half-century to stretching the bounds of the Second Amendment so that each citizen is a consumer of weapons worthy of an army.

Tracy Knauss

The NRA does not serve the Constitution; it serves the arms manufacturers of China, Germany, the Czech Republic, and other points offshore. The names of its executives and lobbyists are etched on the bullets fired on January 8, 2011.

The politicians in the organization’s pay, those who allowed onto the market the once-forbidden expanded magazines that allowed the alleged killer to fire thirty-odd shots before reloading, those who make it easier and cheaper to secure a weapon than to see a therapist, who declared that guns and weapons manufactured in Arizona are not subject to federal regulation—their names are etched on those bullets, too.

Let us continue our thought experiment. Let us imagine that guns and ammunition were so heavily taxed that we could retire our debt. Let us imagine that those who profess to be patriots while putting their political opponents under crosshairs are publicly scorned for their un-American behavior. (They did nothing but talk, you say? Well, the same can be said of Charles Manson.) Let us imagine a political conversation worthy of the founders—heated and sometimes bitter, to be sure, but without the threats of violence that would seem extreme in the Lebanon or El Salvador of 1982, without rhetoric from politicians and commentators worthy of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

I am tired of being angry. It is time, past time, for the healing to begin, while always remembering that bright, cold day in Tucson, and those who fell.

*Above picture at University Medical Center, Tucson, site of a homegrown memorial to the victims of the shooting of January 8, 2011. (c) Gregory McNamee.