Sunday marked the first anniversary of the failed assassination attempt against United States Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The carnage wrought on a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona on January 8th of last year brought six bystanders to their deaths, and unleashed a perfect storm in heated Southwestern politics. Yet the conventional wisdom espoused by commentators after the attack – that the shooting represents the nadir of American political civility – seems lacking a year later.
In the months preceding the shooting, the Grand Canyon State had transformed from the archetypal bastion of cowboy libertarianism into a convenient national symbol for Red State/Blue State politics gone wrong. The passage of Senate Bill 1070 – the now infamous immigration law – heralded federal court battles, boycotts and recall elections. The recession has battered Arizona, a state where decades of boom and bust were fueled by the construction of monotonous subdivisions and anonymous strip malls. In a place where economic growth takes on unusually tangible dimensions, the absence of construction sites only increased antagonism between residents and immigrants; liberals and conservatives; and radicals left and right.
Tenuous times make for convenient scapegoats and pervasive frustration. The Tea Party grew strong, and white supremacists reared their heads. When the perpetrator of the shootings was revealed, he fit the mold of the disturbed Arizonan gone wrong. At the start of his investigation, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik implicated the surge of political discontent and incivility as culprits in the shooting. The aging lawman, a close friend of the Giffords family, too eagerly inculpated the political tension raging in the state.
For when Jared Lee Loughner, the perpetrator of the shootings, was investigated by the police and the media, his life and beliefs were far from the rabid conservatism presaged by the sheriff. In fact, Loughner exhibited no consistent ideology, aside from a virulent belief in conspiracy theories. His writings and actions reveal the depths of his mental illness and the extent of his maligned behavior long before Congresswoman Giffords took office. The lack of convenient answers for Loughner’s malignity is patently frustrating: it seems, perhaps, more comfortable to think that he was mired in hatred for reasons other than the grip of biological illness.
Despite the national attention that the Tucson Shootings garnered, it was but the first of many mass murders in the United States in 2011:
- In June, Carey Hal Dyess shot five people to death and injured another in Yuma, Arizona. His victims were targeted: the dead included his ex-wife’s divorce attorney. He later committed suicide.
- In July, Rodrick Shonte Dantzler of Grand Rapids, Michigan took his own life and those of seven others, all acquaintances. Two people survived the shooting.
- In August, Michael Hance shot seven members of his girlfriend’s family to death in Copley Township, Ohio.
- In September, Eduardo Sencion killed four people and himself at an IHOP in Carson City, Nevada. His targets were apparently random.
- In October, Shareef Allman killed three people in Cupertino, California, and shot seven others. He later killed himself. His victims were former coworkers.
- In October, Scott Evans Dekraai shot eight people to death in Seal Beach, California. He opened fire in a hair salon where his ex-wife worked.
None of this killings elicited wide-ranging political debate or national grief. The targeting of a political figure in an era when political vitriol had reached epic proportions made the shooting prime for national attention and ignited a firestorm of debate. The response of politicians, particularly other members of congress, ranged from the practical to the inane: Representative Peter King suggested a ban on firearms within 1,000 feet of federal officials.
Loughner’s attack on Giffords was clearly premeditated: he harbored long-standing and deep resentments against the congresswoman, but his broader discontent included a distrust of women in politics, deep animosity towards the American populace, and a paranoid belief in conspiracy. His acquaintances had long cautioned that he was mentally unstable: in late 2010 he was denied the adequate mental health clearances to continue as a student at Pima Community College. Since his arrest, Loughner has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and forcibly medicated in prison.
The overtly political reactions to the shooting therefore became a form of denial. The intense attention paid to the shooting in the days and weeks after it occurred separate it from the other mass murders that took place in 2011. The differences between the Giffords Shooting and the others are less significant than they may appear: it takes a deranged person to kill a loved one and even greater irrationality to arbitrarily slaughter acquaintances or bystanders.
Much of the commentary written in the last few days about the anniversary of the shootings acknowledges that the promise of greater civility in politics extolled after the attacks faltered quickly. The politicians and commentators that hastily promised a new era of civility in politics instinctively realized that one deranged man acted on his deranged fantasies. This realization leaves an unsavory explanation: that Jared Lee Loughner, like six of his countrymen last year, acted on his deep mental disturbances, got hold of a firearm, and slaughtered six people. In all likelihood, many more Americans will die in mass shootings in 2012, in seemingly random rampages that have become as much a part of the American fabric as political vitriol.