Congresswoman shot in AZ (Update: in stable condition)

Then the tone of blaming ever one needs to stop. Sarah Palin did not make this guy what any more then Marlyin Manson made Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up there school.

In fact start at 3:15 in this video Metal Story - Episode 4 - Part 4/5 Don't brush them off the video don't brush off what the people in the video are saying.

Becasue what happening with all the news stories here is the same thing that happened with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They are adding 2+2 and coming with with 8.

We don't know anything about this guy. All we know is what those close to him have said. And so far it's all been that he is a crazy nutjob. Out side of that not one person on either side knows what his views are. JediSmuggler needs to stop with it to ever one should stop it. To be honest I don't care what his views are becasue at the end of the day he's still a nutjob. So I'm not going to sit here and play that left and right card.

If people want to talk about how we can help or stop people like this guy I'm all for it. But if we are just going to jump on the blame FOX news and Sara Palin band wagon I'm done here. If we are going to go with what JediSmuggler is doing I'm done here.

But if we are going to have a honest open debate about how to stop people like this and how to help them I'm all for it. Becasue that's what the problem is. I'm more then happy to talk about and figure better ways to help those with Mental Disorders. But saying it's the Tea Partys fault or that he's left wing or what ever does not help.

He really seems to have a Mental Disorder and this whole shooting should bring in to light the lack of help we have for people with Mental Disorders. Being someone with ADD and Asperger syndrome I'm more then happy to have a good honest debate about that and what we can do.

I will not though sit here and play the blame game Jared Lee Loughner should open ever ones eyes to the very big problem of Mental Disorders we have in the USA and of how we don't really do anything to help them. We have people with Personality disorder, Bipolar disorder, and whatever other disorder you can think of and instead of have that debate open up we open up the can of who set him off and jumped on the blame someone band wagon.

[JediSmuggler=]And trying to drag Glenn Beck into this incident was quite despicable as well, Geist. You can't try to jab at someone, then cry for a truce when you're about to take return fire when you get called out on the lies and smears that seem to be the SOP from the political left these days. I have constantly pointed out how Beck has been AGAINST violence, yet you never acknowledge it - and instead persist in insinuating that somehow he has something to do with these acts. A person who does that sort of thing is a smear artist and a liar.

It is also quite obvious that many on the left tried to pin this tragic incident on the Tea Party before the facts came in. You can't just drop those inconvenient facts own the memory hole. It's really not worth discussing things with you until you can accept that.[/quote]

Please Smuggler take the high ground here. Let's just look and Jared Lee Loughner and see what we can do to help and stop people like this before it happens again.

This left vs right is not helping anything. It's all making things wrose here. Jared Lee is not on the left or right. We will never know this guys views politically becasue he may not even understand them.

The last thing I will say is that what Jared Lee Loughner was wrong on many levels. But he also has many many mental problems just from seeing his Youtube videos. I hope in this case instead of putting

 

More information coming in.

Police found, questioned, and released the second man they were looking for. According to the news report, he was a taxi driver who drove the shooter to the supermarket; when the shooter didn't have cash to pay him, they went into the store together to get it. He's in the clear.

During the shooting, a woman stopped the gunman from reloading by grabbing his magazine away. He injured her in the scuffle, and started to pull out another magazine (how many bullets did he bring?), but she'd bought enough time for two men to rush in and tackle him.

According to Fox News, the shooter may have been a fan of a certain white supremacist group called American Renaissance, and may have been influenced by them.

 

It's interesting to me that he went to Mountain View High School, a rival high school of my own, and one that is situated in what has historically been an affluent area in Mesa. Glad he didn't go to my high school.

 

So it was acceptable for Matthew Yglesias and Markos Moulitsas to immediately blame Sarah Palin before any facts were in, yet they did not complain when multiple Democratic committees used similar imagery, including on Moulitsas's own site? It is quite obvious a number of them sought to use this tragci event as a political weapon against Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, and I have linked to Politico quoting a Democratic strategist saying that Obama needed to "deftly pin" this attack on the Tea Party in the past on this thread, while Mark Penn[/link was saying Obama needed an Oklahoma City moment. It is as if the despicable efforts by Moulitsas, Ygleias, and others who sought to make political hay never happened.

You and Knightwriter really have no room to complain, particularly given some of the rhetoric you have dished out towards the Tea Party - including deciding to call them racist over disagreements on fiscal policy. Yet it seems that pointing out conduct on the left - including the similar aiming that he used on Giffords - now makes me a bully and an authoritarian.

If you're going to call me a racist, then you have no right to expect me to be polite to you. Right now, I have no reason to presume decency or good faith on your part and see no reason to give you or KW (or other liberals on this forum) the benefit of the doubt.

 

It's like Gonk is prescient. Suddenly, a thread about a Democratic Congresswoman being shot is really about you being victimized. Take it somewhere else, please.

 

Mark Penn? Huh. To hell with that guy. He's shifty and incompetent. Didn't know he was still working in politics, after his debacle as Hillary's campaign manager.

Anyway, there are certainly some ******* (rhymes with "smoochy") lefties out there, don't get me wrong. But I think we have two bigger things to worry about:

One, people are way too angry, for the wrong reasons, and way too afraid of the wrong things. Some politicians are happy to rile people to anger, because angry people vote, but they don't always consider what those angry people might do.

Two, we need to take a look at how loners like this gunman fall through the cracks. I'm not saying we should federally regulate crazy people, or anything that draconian, but here's the thing: People like him feel like they're apart from society, and they often resent society in general for ignoring or rejecting them. Sometimes they're just born different, giving off a vibe that makes other people uncomfortable, and they have a hard time fitting in or being happy anywhere. Sometimes they do function in society, but have troubles inside that they can't or don't want to express to anyone. (I used to work with the mentally ill, and I wouldn't claim to be an expert, but I've seen examples of both.) On top of that, some kinds of mental illness don't always fully kick in until young adulthood; schizophrenia, for example, can creep in out of basically nowhere when you're in your early twenties.

I worry that there might be a growing trend with potentially violent loners, in which stories like this one give them the idea that this is what's supposed to happen; like this is how they're supposed to go out.

We, as a society, need to find better ways to connect with these people -- not control them, but connect with them and relate to them -- before they go over the edge.

 

Oh, hey, ani, just saw your post at the bottom of the last page.

I...um...never thought I'd agree with you.

You're right. We do need better ways to identify and treat the mentally ill, if we're going to prevent a tragedy like this from happening again.

Part of the problem we have right now, when it comes to treating mental illness in general, is that people are afraid of the mentally ill. If a person has any sort of mental disorder, they'll usually do all they can to hide it, because if they admit it, most other people will shun or mistreat them. (You might have some experience with that yourself.) When someone has a physical condition they don't understand or can't control, they go to the doctor. When someone has a mental condition, they...well, too often, they keep it under wraps and hope it goes away.

I think one of the ways we can help, as a general idea, is to make it more acceptable to treat and talk about what goes in people's heads. The more people understand about mental disorders, the less they'll have to fear, and the more that people who have them can be comfortable living with them in regular society.

 

By the way, this just in: One of the gunman's old classmates wrote about him at the time, and was afraid of him even years ago.

We don't really have a way to take care of obviously distubed people who haven't gotten violent yet. I wouldn't suggest we go all Minority Report and start arresting people for future crimes, or for thoughtcrime, but there's got to be a way we can take care of these people as a culture without cutting into their rights as individuals.

 

It took me longer than it should have, but in the middle of telling someone how Palin is like Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone, I suddenly realized that the parallels are even more eerie now: Palin's chances, whatever they were, are dead now, thanks to a shooting, just as Stillson's chances were dead after he used a child to shield himself.

I bet Stephen King couldn't believe it even more than most.

 

Well, that his parents, apparently, were informed that for him to return to school he would have to undergo a mental evaluation seems to indicate both his videos against the school and a clear example of where there should've been a warning sign that family should've stepped in.

 

I can't imagine what they're going through. Maybe they were negligent, or maybe they did all they could to help him; we might not know for a while. Either way, it's got to be a crushing blow for them.

We had a guy in my old college town once... Damn, has it really been eleven years? He was well known for being crazy, always shouting at the air, challenging girls to fights, and taking most of his clothes off in public. One night, he took his parents' car and fatally ran down several people, then jumped out and ran around screaming about how he was the angel of death until they wrestled him down.

His dad, a TV producer, testified at his trial. In his testimony, he talked about how his son had been diagnosed with mental illness several times, but swept the diagnoses under the rug. He said he'd always been fearful of labels, and that he wanted his son to be seen as a person, not as a mentally ill person.

Now he's seen as a murderer, and he's locked up in an institution, where he'll probably spend the rest of his life.

Horrible for all for involved. Still, at least he didn't pre-meditate it and kill a child, like the guy did. The news is saying now that the nine-year-old girl wanted to go to the meet to learn more about our government. "Tragic" isn't the start of it.

 

Seriously. The only real victims here are either deceased or in the hospital, and I find this whole argument about which "side" is at fault here to be in terribly poor taste.

 

It was wrong of some people on the left to blame tea partiers within minutes of the news breaking, with no evidence. But getting all offended here isn't going to help.

As for the shooter's beliefs, he might be a fan of this crazy conspiracy theorist. They both agree that the government is controlling our minds through grammar.

 

Yeah, that might explain his weird sentence structure in his writings. It's like, "I am writing a sentence. This is a sentence that I am writing. This is my sentence that I have written." Bizarre stuff.

 

A more in-depth bio of the gunman. Apparently, he'd been fixated on Giffords for several years, ever since she blew off his weird question ("How do you know what words mean?") at a previous meeting. That doesn't make any of the recent rhetoric we've been talking about any less nasty or destructive, but I don't think you can blame it for this guy, given that long-term grudge.

KW, I'd love to see Palin's political career end as much as you would, but I don't think this is the right way. Like a lot of politicians these days, she ought to tone down the rhetoric and watch what she says, and the comment from her office (not from her personally) today about how the crosshairs on the map were actually "surveyors' marks" is boneheaded for sure.

But if people reject her just on this, and not because of who she is or what she represents (willful, capricious ignorance, mostly), then they'll just be waiting around for someone else like her to take her place. The only proper way to drive her out is for the country to come to agree that she's bad for us. Ironically, the worst thing she could do for her career is run for president; if she did that, she'd have to come to the press, and not on her own terms the way she does now.

 

Well, that continues to give some idea of him, and seems to further put him in a very small group removed from normal U.S. political dynamics, and seems to imply that Giffords was a target because she was in Congress rather than anything more specific, though hopefully we get information from him on his motives.

 

Some might want to dial back on the use of words like "crazy", "insane" or "wackjob". Amateur mental health diagnosis isn't helping much, and even if the assessment is correct, how much would it change? There are many people in this nation who have mental health conditions who don't kill people, and a great many murders performed by people who otherwise appear to be in perfect mental health. The condition of the shooter's mental health could contribute to the events, but it's a mix of a large number of factors, and the alteration of any one might mean that the events would not have occurred. But contributing to the idea that "A person has a mental illness and kills people, mystery solved!" is incredibly unkind to others who may have mental conditions, and many statistics suggest that they are probably of a danger to themselves than they are to others, and fear of be stigmatized as violent and dangerous may prevent people from talking about it.

There is no one magic button for acts of violence, but a discussion about mental health in this case is probably best held after an official diagnosis. As a society there are many issues to discuss and many things we can do.

 

That bio goes on to say that he shot Giffords first, then gunned down a bunch of other random people he had no quarrel with. Including a child.

If he'd sprayed around wildly trying to hit her, that'd still be deplorable, but it'd be comprehensible. This is just malice for the sake of malice. I mean, hell, Oswald and Booth didn't go firing into the crowd afterwards.

One thing's for sure: There's no way the insanity defense is going to work with this guy. To be legally insane, you have to be unable to distinguish right from wrong. This guy knew what he was doing. All premeditated, all cold-blooded.

 

Yeah, this is the missing story right now. I feel so bad for this kid's family, but where are they? The police have said they searched his house. Did he still live with his parents? Did they try to get help for their son, after the college requested a mental evaluation?

 

From the news that's come in so far, it sounds like he did still live with his parents.

 

Ok, this is weird. Just hearing that Gabrielle Giffords' YouTube account "subscribed" to Jared Loughner's rambling video channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/giffords2

Bottom-left, his is Classitup10.

Did somebody hack her account? Is this a fake account? Why would anyone in charge of her YouTube channel want to subscribe to the shooter's channel?

(Her age is also wrong, at 27, but I hear her media manager is 27.)

 

Too bad it doesn't say when the subscription was made. My guess is someone on her staff scoped the gunman's YouTube site out after the account to see if they could find any answers.

EDIT: CNN.com has a picture of the little girl up now.

This guy, this lowlife, he thought he had the right.

He thought he had the right.

 

I forsee a lethal injection in the killer's future.

 

Mother Jones has an interview with a friend of his that was apparently called Saturday morning and got a voicemail from Loughner.


I'm going to go on record now... I hope this doesn't result in death penalty, but life without parole.

 

I hope there is one. We cannot allow anyone - be it a madman or political extremist - to go after public officials with a bullet. This is a case for which the death penalty is appropriate.

EDIT: Meanwhile, Big Journalism reports that Palin's PAC had actually used surveyor symbols, not crosshairs on the map in question.

EDIT 2: The shooter was also a 9/11 Truther.