House of Reps. member Giffords shot in Arizona today

pom, how many of those guns are going to the Mexican drug cartels?

okie--do you really think that the conservatives being more guilty than the liberals or the liberals being more guilty than the conservatives has anything to do with the actuality of who is guilty.

It's a bit like saying that the lass who does the butterfly flutter in the brothel is more immoral than the one who specialises in the sponge cake slices.

I am genuinely curious about something. Arizona has, I guess, a relatively high percentage of the population owning guns. Hunting guns, target shooting guns.
How does it compare to other states in regard to concealed weapons permits?
There were dozens, perhaps a 100 people in the area close to Rep Giffords at the Safeway store. Why did none of them take any action?
Instead the guy was was taken down by a 71-year old man, a 60-something woman and a couple of other people.

The only people who have so far apologised are those who engendered the shooter.

It is a timely reminder of the first sentence in Laurence Sterne's masterpiece Tristram Shandy and the risks every couple take when they get into the heavy breathing bit.

I gave your post a thumbs up.

While I deplore violent language in politics, I haven't in this thread blamed the killings on Conservative rhetoric; just wanted to make that clear.



If it makes you happy, I will both reject and denounce them.

Cycloptichorn

Your question is out of date.

There simply isn't time for people with concealed carry licenses to stop something like this. The whole event took about 20 seconds. No civilian is going to stop something in that short a time, no matter what they are carrying.



It's kind of funny that you bring this up, because the one guy there who DID have a concealed weapon, drew it and ran forward to stop the thing? He almost shot the guy who wrested the gun away from Loughner, because it simply wasn't clear that he wasn't in fact the bad guy at first.

The idea that concealed weapons can stop events like this is not credible.

Cycloptichorn

Wow, both okie AND spendius said something I wholeheartedly agree with.

Must be because of that new zodiac sign that was just added to the cosmos.

Do you think that she may settle for herman cain's vice or maybe a intern?

Well all due respect Lash, but I doubt the mental and emotional stability of anyone who insists they know others' personal tendencies (in this case, their emotional reactions in specific situations) better than the people themselves. It is barely possible, though you and Finn don't seem to want to admit it, that everyone will not react with the same amounts of cynicism or anger (or whatever that is you two are claiming in common to all).

We need to focus on the actual guilty party, which is Loughner. Then I think it would be fair game to examine his motivations, and if he had been an avid reader of Karl Marx for example, or if he was a member of the John Birch Society or Moveon.org or some such organization, then we could talk about possible political motivations. Ultimately however, the guilty party is reponsible for their actions, unless evidence comes forth that indicates somebody put them up to it or paid them to do it or something.

Regarding whether conservatives or liberals are more guilty, this is only my opinion, but I think Democrats and liberals are more prone to demagoguing an issue, and that radical liberals are at least as prone, perhaps more prone to commit violent acts. Perhaps my view on this has been tainted by living through the Vietnam protest era, wherein it was not that uncommon for leftist groups to be doing such stuff. An example would be the Weather Underground, of which Bill Ayers was a member of, which openly advocated overthrowing the United States Government, and was involved with bombing the Pentagon. Not that many years ago, he was quoted as saying he should have done more.

Part of the reason I think liberals are more involved with subversive groups is the fact that liberals are kind of groupees by nature, while conservatives are individualistic and tend not as much to belong to groups that might be anti-American, etc.

Bottom line though, we must remember that we should hold the individuals involved in crimes responsible, not other indirect factors. One example, even though TV is rampant with violence, murders, etc., we still must hold criminals responsible for the crimes they commit. Violence on TV is not a positive influence upon society, but we can't put TV in jail, nor can we abolish it.

Hello??!!? Death Panels, anyone?

Both sides demagogue issues with abandon.

Cycloptichorn

Have you ever thought about studying anthropology? It may change your frame of reference!

Even the liberals in AZ?

All groups have bad apples no group is exempt from immoral behavior

The articles I read today suggested that President Obama's speech last night was very good. Many prominent Republicans, including conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, praised him. I haven't heard how Rush Limbaugh responded.
There is a bit of criticism about the audience, which treated this more as a pep rally rather than a memorial service.
Any thoughts on that?

I'm claiming universal humanity....in humans. You don't have to be a cynic or an angry person to have experienced a moment of muttering that you prefer an unbalanced person not to act on.

Frankly I did not even watch it. I did hear a couple of callers today to talk shows that were offended by the pep rally atmosphere. I think one of the callers might have been somebody that lost a loved one, although I am not sure, but the caller was very offended by the pep rally campaign type atmosphere. I have to agree if I was in that position, I might very well have felt the same way.

Hmmm, interesting - I just read (fast) Slate's Jack Shafer's take on:

Jared Loughner's World of Illusion … and Ours
The accused Tucson killer isn't the only one who has a love affair with alternative realities.
http://www.slate.com/id/2281140/pagenum/all/

A clip -
As long as we're using Jared Lee Loughner's tastes in philosophy and literature to probe his psyche—and I'm not saying we shouldn't—let's scrutinized our own tastes, too. I'm not suggesting a Mailerian equivalence between Loughner and the average man, so stop composing that irate e-mail to me right now. But Loughner's obsession with alternative realities, his idea that the universe is malleable and a function of an individual's will, is mirrored almost everywhere we look in pop culture.

According to a Mother Jones piece by Nick Baumann, Loughner believed in "lucid dreaming," namely that "conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control." That may sound like the currency of the insane, but it's the stuff of our most popular entertainments. Lucid dreaming served as the foundation for the fifth-best grossing movie of 2010, Inception.

end/clip


Thoughts?

Very interesting indeed ossobuco! Someting very odd to me is that I study many different subjects and one that I was studying a couple of weeks ago was mind control!

The odd part about it was that I came across this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCzar1Y-go8
it happens to be a video by the killer!

I thought it was stupid so I did not watch the whole thing when I first seen it.

I did do a search on him to study what kind of mind this person had and he seem to me to make no sense about the things he was speaking about. If I only new how to tell if someone was so messed up that they would take other peoples life I would have spoke up