Violence is our heritage. Guns are our heritage. If you were to enact strict gun control, the crazies would simply resort to IEDs just as they do in countries that already have strict gun control.
If we are ever to avoid violence of the Tuscon type, we must reinvent the United States.

Is anyone calling for the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine? When fair and balanced hit the shitpile, courtesy of Mark Fowler and Justice Scalia, right-wing media was free to pursue their plan of virtually drowning out all competing viewpoints.

The extent to which the narrative is controlled by the right in this country is exemplified by the comparably hyperbolic emphasis placed on radical leftist groups relative to the power and numbers of the KKK and the White Citizens Councils in the 60's. Oh sure there were some colorful groups on the left who advocated violent resistance but these refrains that completely ignore much larger violent conservative groups belie the extent to which Americans in general and the media in particular see history through the rose-colored glasses worn by privileged white men.

"... none was more indisputable than his [Obama's] statement that no one can know what is in a killer's mind."

So we have this generalization 'no one can know what is in a killer's mind'.

Does anyone know how we make sense of this sentence? Is there sufficient evidence to support it?

How would Obama and Rich go about justifying such a claim?

Can anyone know what is in a nice, law-abiding, sweet, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly peron's mind?

Can anyone know what is in anyone's mind?

Usually, we do at least get a sense of what's in our fellow human beings' minds by taking our bearings by their utterances, their behavior, their habits, their activities, their writings (if they produce any), their correspondence, in brief, by all the publicly verifiable traces of their lives.

But our president and the New York Times tell us that such does not hold in the case of killers. The mind of a killer is inaccessible territory. It is an unknowable autistic and hermetically closed sphere, beyond our reach. (They might as well tell us that one needs a security clearance to gain access to it.)

Never mind the common and everyday fact that no police investigation abides by that "indisputable" presidential pearl of wisdom, now fully endorsed by the paper of record.

It's the guns, stupid. Our national obsession with guns and our lax gun laws make it easy for the unstable, the insane and just plain angry jackasses to obtain high powered lethal weapons and to go on the rampage. Certain types of guns now available should be banned and guns should be at least as well regulated as cars, toys and airplanes. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, there is no constitutional right to own toys, cars or planes or to fly in planes. So what, the 2nd amendment is not an absolute right, owning guns does entail responsibilities. Not to worry, the NRA will not allow for any sane gun laws and the American public doesn't appear to give a damn about the regularly occurring massacres while the gun obsessed are quite vocal. I sincerely pray that we have no more massacres but with the easy availability of guns in so many states and with the hordes of wacked out nut jobs in this country, more gun slaughters are guaranteed.

It's about time that Muslim leaders speak out against...right-wing republicans inciting violence.

No one has "listened" or acted on any initiative after any of the tragic violence (death by guns or high-tech weapons) that goes on day after day--in war and in cities such as LA, Oakland, and so on.

Most of our schools are now a breeding ground for increasingly violent bullying. Just now adults are starting to think it's a good idea to stand up to these juveniles run amok. Bullies think they're being "cool." "W" was a good role model for bullies. So are big corporations and US Foreign policy and the media that keeps the public focused on crime, bad news and misbehaving entertainers, plus the talk shows that broadcast a drumbeat of anger and violent solutions.

The far right politicians and propagandists in refusing to cede any ground regarding the inappropriateness of rhetoric advocating violence indicate (intentionally or not) that their corporatist masters have told them to continue using such angry and hostile rhetoric because it is absolutely essential for co-opting populist movements arising out of the growing anger and frustration of the little people.

We reap what we sow. Suck it up.
Or start in your own surroundings to live a different life; start living cooperatively, start efforts to take the money out of the politics and start a State owned bank that can help to finance worker coops.

"If we learn nothing from this tragedy, we are back where we started. And where we started was with two years of accelerating political violence - actual violence, not to be confused with violent language - that struck fear into many, not the least of whom was Gabrielle Giffords."

TWO YEARS? Wasn't the invasion of Iraq political violence? Didn't we hunt down and kill our political enemy Saddam Hussein? Wasn't one of our big reasons for invading Afghanistan the pursuit if our political enemy Bin Laden? Isn't terrorism defined as political violence?

Our government fights terror with terror, it's just that some citizens do it WITH government sanctions, and some do it without government sanctions. In this case it's hard to tell which is which.

President Obama talks of the need for "civility" and "honesty" ...

...while Obama continues to use drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan (a practice that has killed hundreds of innocent civilians), "detain" people in Guantanamo indefinitely without trial or even charge (including Bradley Manning), "render" people to countries known to torture, etc, hold and while Obama has been deafeningly silent about the calls for assassination of Wikileaks' Julian Assange (by high profile people on both sides of the political aisle)

As Glenn Greenwald has astutely pointed out, much of the talk of "civility" by the DC crowd is actually quite disingenuous:

"vapid notions of 'civility' to which ... most DC denizens cling as a means of justifying what they're actually advocating (we may be defending repulsive and destructive ideas -- we're cheering on wars and insisting on legal immunity for torturers -- but at least we're doing it in a soft-spoken manner while sitting in plush think tank conference rooms with name plates and pitchers of water, which entitles us to respect and deference)."

Some of the comments attached to the Frank Rich article on the original NYT site are quite provocative. Instead of sorting through all of them, I find the readers' recommendations, as always, are sensible and intelligent. One in particular reminded us that Democrats should be wary of calls for civility. That doubles for all of outside the two-party system; demands for civility usually mask demands for silence.

You know, I have another solution which is not inherently violent to resolve our differences. I suggest that the civil war was a huge mistake. We don't have a real union. All you tea baggers want to go back a century and take your country back--, so do I. Let's just peaceably divide the country, along lines which reflect the fundamental differences about how we should be governed and what the legitimate functions of government are. For those who think that promoting the general welfare means more than giving business whatever it wants, those of us who live mostly in the east, we form one nation, say from the Mason Dixon line up and bordered with the PA-Ohio line in the west. The old Confederacy in the South and most of the West would follow the principles that civil rights aren't that important and that government functions should be minimized. California, Oregon, Washington could be a separate nation in the West coast, I'm not sure exactly what they would embrace but leave it to them to develop their own identidy. Those in the center of PA will have to move to Alabama but they will be right at home there and perhaps a few progressive in Austin will migrate north to take their place. We can't resolve our differences and a civil war is not worth fighting. Let's call it a day and peacibly separate. I don't want my federal dollars going to states which are on the whole an economic burden to the rest of us as they are now and those very states so resentful of federal government seem pretty sure that they would do better without anyone's help anyway. It's a situation very similar to the breakup of Czechoslovakia. No more arguing with them and no more threatening from the Slovaks-- I mean the South. Let them live their wretched lives imprisoned in the fascist state that they will set up for themselves. Just don't let them have nukes.

I haven't read the posts here yet. However, obama's speech was his first formal one for 2012 election cycle. He said nothing of gun laws, mental health, etc. And yes, last year he famously said that he had a drone with someone's name on it, as i recall.

Sorry, but who couldn't have done a good job under these circumstances - if already well versed in speech making?

And, as an aside, the shooter was using a weapon which was designed for hunting people. And the few raves that i know of, attributed to him, were certainly government related. Not to mention a female in one of his classes who felt threatened by his response to her pro choice poem.

Some years ago now the Australian government formally apologized for their treatment of their Aborigine population, what was an extraordinary gesture. Once we in this country are able to do the same, apologize to our Native (First!) American population for the genocide our forebears committed against them, what amounted to a genocide far greater in scope than what happened to the Jewish population in WWII Europe, then maybe a real reckoning can begin to happen as to why we are such a violent nation. Until then, we'll likely continue to be driven by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that has always been like a virus in our bloodstream, providing entitlement to conquer and control the world as we see fit. Now that the imperialism of our Manifest Destiny is beginning to fade in the form of our devaluing currency in global markets, the violence that has always been behind our expansion is now recoiling like a snake to strike at its master.

The point is this: this doctrine has played out, as a matter of cause and effect, to create the world we now live in, and so the cultural impetus behind it, now in a state of contraction, seeks another avenue for its expression, and without anywhere left for it to go forward it simply turns back down the path from whence it came.

The form this primarily takes is a violence that we turn upon ourselves increasingly.

In essence, it seems illogical to suppose that there's no connection between our imperialism and the fact that the U.S. of A. is the most murder happy country in the world so overwhelmingly it defies imagination.

On the Tohono O'odham reservation where I teach there are stories deeply embedded in their culture of how, more than a century ago, many hundreds of the O'odham people were massacred en masse because they refused to become Catholic or Christian. As long as the stain of this blood continues to go unacknowledged by the dominant white man culture, there will be no peace among us. It's like the serial killer who one-pointedly denies his or her actions and keeps wearing a happy-go-lucky insane look on his face. In my view, it makes the issue of our own civil war and all its many repercussions in our current day politics look like a tawdry sideshow.

May the day come when we all can look back and say what a barbaric time that was. Such is my prayer and hope.

"no one can know what is in a killer's mind"

Sad this this mass murder, Obama, makes a speech then people listen like he is a wise and great man.

Obama is a mass murderer of innocent people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

People should not listen to his BS. He is sickening.

Corrupt Washington politics, beginning? you pick the year, are complicit in creating a culture of low-level insanity in America. That very phony facsimile parading around as democracy has been outed. I would have to guess that less than half, probably much lower, of US feel represented by any political party. For many citizens struggling with day to day strife, agitated by media pundits and some politicians, frustration can get to the point of mental break down. Most of us will not lose it as Loughner did but that doesn't permit the entire governmental complex to skate without blame. Both major parties are cohorts in creating the distrust most of US feel for any politician. That feeling is not healthy and manifests in different ways for different people.

To have lost faith in one's government is a big failure of our society. Government, take it or leave, is a big part of all of our lives. As Obama is a major part of the corrupt government he makes a very poor motivator for civility, or anything of merit to be precise. It's hard for me to gain hopefulness from someone who commits crimes against humanity on a daily basis. The sooner Americans realize that politicians in general don't make good role models, the sooner we can reach the aha! moment. Even the apparent good ones, such as Gabby Giffords, are hopelessly noneffective against a system fully owned by money, greed and power.

The future can belong to the masses but not without hard work, sacrifice and perseverance. We have much more in common with each other than we do with the billionaires in charge. The tipping point is near.

Not long ago a poster on this site recounted her visit to a right-wing blog at which posters were comparing the length of their guns and expressing pride or envy as if they were equating gun size to penis size. And what has turned up featuring the Tucson shooter? Why, of course, a video of him posing in nothing but a red g-string with his gun held over his private parts. Perhaps in some men a gun (often brandished while talking tough) is an attempt to prove their mansculinity.

Obama's Tucson speech achieved its purpose superbly, as has his Presidency so far. That purpose is to render the effects of the current corporate takeover of democracy acceptable to the American public. What made the speech so effective is that it appealed to our innate desire for reconciliation at such a time. But, like his entire "reach-across-the-aisle" strategy, it hides a more important agenda.

His first object was to minimize the right-wing role in providing the ideologically-based target for the gunman. The point was to absolve the right of any guilt for the effects of their violent rhetoric and anti-government conspiracy theories - clearly reflected in Loughner's internet postings. Just as he implicitly absolved Bush and Cheney for their crimes of torture and lying a nation into war, in this case, he absolved Beck, Palin and their frothing legions of the effects of their irresponsible rhetoric.

As the poster kivals pointed out "...it is absolutely essential for co-opting populist movements arising out of the growing anger and frustration of the little people" that such rhetoric continue. The right-wing hate campaign has been found to be a very effective way to divert anger from its real targets - the Wall Street bankers who looted the Treasury - to their preferred targets - those such as Gifford who might stand in the way of the new "austerity" measures that the corporate elite requires to safeguard their profit margins.

His second goal was to repudiate his liberal supporters, a technique he has nearly perfected. He implicitly denounced the sad, but experienced words of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik: "When the rhetoric about hatred, about mistrust of government, about paranoia of how government operates, and to try to inflame the public on a daily business, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with." Progressive demands for less violent rhetoric on the right were implicitly equated with the very rhetoric they condemned. Chillingly, he also implicitly nullified Giffords' own fears. Once again, Obama achieved the targets set by his corporate masters.

It was a brilliant success, as attested by its near universal acclaim, from Charles Krauthammer to Peggy Noonan to E.J. Dionne. Such acclaim reveals a key performance indicator in the green for Mr. Obama. After this speech, it seems a pity that the violence must continue, that we must fear ideologically-motivated killings more than ever, but we are happy to pay the price for the delights of oligarchy.

Someday we shall learn this truth -- that guns only bring on more and bigger guns..... :

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction...

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"a 'surveyor's symbol,' not gun sights."

how many remember the Minutemen graffiti from the late 60's?

having lunch in a Willets bar, I was told by the Ma-Kettle-type serving behind the bar that it was okay for me to have long hair but if her son came back from college with the same, she'd shoot him "with the gun you see hanging there". she did make a nice lunch.

From the start, I find it highly manipulative and propagandizing (not to mention excruciating) the way the US "news" and most others have associated the word "tragedy" with what happened recently in Tucson. The writer does this repeatedly.
It may be tragic for those closest to it (of course) -- but surely one of the first words that should come to mind for the rest of us is "atrocity". Consider the contrast:
"Tragedy in Tucson" -- message -- "Like the weather there is nothing we can do about it. It came out of thin air. We need to deal with it. Suck it up, people. Get over it."
"Atrocity in Tucson" -- message -- "Geez-- is THIS the country we are living in? What is going on here for God's Sake?? Something REAL needs to be DONE about this!!"
And the very least would be new calls for gun restrictions from Democrats (LOL). Which -- as pointed out by an excellent article on this site today -- has not been forthcoming. What IS going on in this country?????