Note: I have a personal policy to not name people who engage in these types violent acts, since one of the big motivators seems to be a desire for fame. I refuse to help them in that cause.
The big argument in the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others is whether or not the shooter was crazy. As Robert Wright pointed out in today’s New York Times, that has a lot to do with a desire to control the narrative from a political standpoint. If the shooter (in this case) is sane, then he can be cast as a “coherent expression” of the ideology he’s said to represent. If he’s crazy, then no one he’s connected to can be held to account for his actions.
In this case, it seems at first glance that the shooter was just crazy. The list of books he claimed were his influences seem to come from all over the political globe. And then there’s the fact that he killed or wounded 19 people. We tend to view such people as something less than the epitome of mental stability.
But what if there’s more going on here than “just crazy” or “lone gunman”? There may be.
If you haven’t heard of the “sovereign citizens” movement, that’s probably because it doesn’t get much attention. It doesn’t get much attention because it’s difficult to figure out just what sovereign citizens are saying, much of the time. Fortunately, people like Justine Sharrock and J J MacNab have spent a lot of time deciphering their views and arguments. (Kevin Carey’s story in the Washington Monthly also provides some good background.)
There’s too much here for me to sum up–you’ll need to spend some time working through it–and I don’t want to suggest that this shooter was completely sane just because there may have been an ideology behind his attack. After all, McNab estimates there may be as many as 300,000 hard core sovereign believers, and the vast majority haven’t engaged in acts of violence against law enforcement or government officials. This seems more like a both/and situation rather than an either/or one.
But I think it’s important to widen the narrative around this incident, because right now the argument seems to be over whether the political climate contributed to this action, and how much responsibility certain public figures should bear for this man’s actions. There are side debates over gun control going on as well, with one Arizona politician carrying her gun onto the floor of the State House, while another, Republican Peter King, wants to ban guns within 1,000 feet of a federal official. There’s even been one Arizona Republican party official who has resigned his position because he fears for his safety.
And the public figures who’ve found themselves at the center of this controversy seem to be doubling down rather than rethinking what they’ve said in the past. The latest instance (earlier today) is the use of the term “blood libel” to describe the connections between their statements and the killings in Arizona. The phrase “blood libel,” by the way, refers to the “centuries-old anti-Semitic slander – the false charge that Jews use the blood of Christian children for rituals – that has been used as an excuse for persecution.”
There’s been relatively little discussion over improving health care for those with mental illness, however, and that’s worrying since the dominant narrative seems to be that this man was crazy. Unfortunately, the current mode of thinking seems to be that we can’t really do anything about crazy, so we’ll just mourn and move on and wait for the next disaster.
Mix all this together–a reckless disregard for facts and the meanings of words, a society that celebrates violence, and a disregard for the mental health of its citizens–and it’s a wonder we don’t see more incidents like this.
7 responses
“right now the argument seems to be over whether the political climate contributed to this action, and how much responsibility certain public figures should bear for this man’s actions. There are side debates over gun control going on as well”
I find this so crazy. The main discussion is, apparently, whether we should blame the “political climate,” whereas the actual, real-life policy issue that could prevent these incidents in the future– gun control– is just a “side debate.” What the hell is going on? Why is it more important to blame Sarah Palin or not blame Sarah Palin or blame fringe right-wing movements, or blame whomever, then it is to actually address a serious and deadly problem in our country (widespread availability of horrendously lethal weapons)?
Because CNN and Fox News don’t generate any interest when they talk about policy issues such as gun control. They only generate interest and ratings when they post inflammatory editorials by pundits blaming one another. Oh yeah, and when they mention or show Sarah Palin in any way shape or form they get lots of web traffic.
And I appreciate Steve Almond’s piece– it’s poetic, moving, honest, timely, insightful, etc. But do we really need one editorial examining the Giffords shooting through the lens of political partisanship or the degraded political discourse in the U.S.?
It’s all a bit disconcerting because it seems like commentators are comparing our current toxic political climate to some imagined former period of civility and enlightened debate. When exactly was this time? Was it at our nation’s founding when politicians literally engaged in gun battles over political issues (Aaron Burr), was it around the time of the Civil War when a disgruntled states’ rights advocate assassinated the president over political issues? Was it in the 60’s when Kennedy and MLK were assassinated or possibly in the 70’s when Harvey Milk was killed?
I think I’m in love with this Aaron guy.
Aaron’s response deserves serious consideration, and contemplation from multiple points of view. He should expand on it and it should be published as its own piece.
Does Aaron have a Twitter following?
Aaron,
I don’t think that I suggested that there was a better, more civil time. At least I hope I didn’t–I’m a believer that there are few things more destructive to the future than engaging in nostalgic thinking. And what I tried to get across in this piece was that a person suffering from mental illness can also have a political bent that makes sense (to them at least) which would make an attack like this one a political statement. And I think it’s a mistake if we simply dismiss it as the work of a psycho or a lone gunman because then we don’t spend any time dealing with the root causes of this violence.
Your point that there is no previous time where civility reigned is a good one, but I think it misses one key ingredient. There’s always been incivility in the political world, and in day-to-day life, and in the media. But the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and the need to feed that beast with ever more sensational stories to keep and hold viewer attention so they don’t change channels or stations or websites has led to a world where objective facts are disappearing, where it’s considered acceptable and mainstream believe things about the world that are demonstrably false, and where almost no one will call you on it.
There’s been a joke for about the last 20 years about on-the-one-hand journalism about how reporters are afraid to say that the earth is round. They’d rather have a story about the controversy. That wasn’t always the case, and it isn’t in some places, but the problem is that it is the case in enough places that you can find news that will never upset your sensibilities. That’s how we get people believing that the ACA had death panels in it, or that not only were there were WMD in Iraq, that they were smuggled to Syria, or that the President was actually born in Kenya, not Hawaii. If we live in a world where we can choose our own facts as well as our own interpretations of them, then we’re going to see more and more of these kinds of incidents, because it’s hard to pick out the crazy people when there’s no definition of sane.
You didn’t hearken back to a nostalgic time of goodwill– but that concept is implicit in the currently fashionable (in progressive circles) meme that the Tea Party has poisoned public discourse in some kind of new and violent way. Even if this is true, it’s nothing new for American politics. And to blame the Giffords shooting on such a flimsy premise just seems like an attempt to shoe-horn the tragedy into a facile talking point for the endless (and pointless) Right vs. Left shouting match.
And I hear what you are saying about the way the 24 hour news cycle has changed things, and I believe you are right. But one of the overriding effects of this news cycle is to trivialize all events so that they mesh into the politico-media’s central (and perhaps only) topic: the spectator sport of American politics. Because Americans love our sports, and politics gives us the one sport we don’t have to feel embarrassed for being passionate about. Even intellectuals can get rah-rah about Right vs. Left without feeling like they are getting too invested in grown men playing a children’s game.
But they are! It’s school-yard clique fighting– the bullies vs. the weirdos, the jocks vs. the punks, the kickers vs. the band nerds, etc. Hey, wake up! This is real! A 9 year old girl was murdered. Don’t let them turn this into one more trivial talking point. That girl did not die because Sarah Palin drew some crosshairs on a map. For the media to make such a claim is grossly cynical and dishonest.
We have a serious problem with lethal weapons in our country and guess what? It is only going to get worse. You think a 30 round semi-automatic Glock is dangerous? Just wait for whatever they come up with next. Weapons technology is only going to up the ante!
9 people died in the Giffords shooting, 13 people died at Columbine, 32 people died in the Virgina Tech massacre. And none of these gunmen were even trained! How deadly must society become before we draw a line? How many people are we going to sacrifice at the NRA’s altar? How many more 9 year old girls?
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