Shooters & Hate Speech
Maybe the Giffords shooting hit closer to home for the political class than say, the Maj. Hassan or Hinckley attempts, because it targeted one of their own. These same folks didn't get worried about radical Islam, nor did they try to ban pretty actresses whom disturbed people might want to impress, but now they want to go after speech that might offend someone.
Leave aside the fact that there is ZERO evidence that it was the tenor of public discourse that triggered the shooting in Tuscon, or that if this fellow were political, someone who burns the flag and objects to the idea of being "under God," that he is unlikely to ally himself with the Right, or that the Left is loaded with hate speech and targeting metaphors.
Hey, let's even ignore the idea that whatever the effect of heated rhetoric, how it affects an irrational person will have nothing to do with objective norms and standards.
The larger point is that legislating what's acceptable moves you from an objective to a subjective standard that is not properly the realm of law -- that's what social conventions are for, and why I miss a society that wasn't afraid of having normative judgments.
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Jul '10
Re: Shooters & Hate Speech
A society with normative judgments? Horrors!
Where would that leave those of us who tattoo our faces with Maori motifs and have intimate relations with pandas?
Hater.
Sep '10
Re: Shooters & Hate Speech
The reactions to this tragedy have certainly exposed our politicians and journalists for who they really are..
And I can't get over the death of that little girl. So innocent and curious, taking initiative that few children have to learn about the larger world around her and how it works. Christina-Taylor Green should become a motivator for all of us who love liberty and morality.
Sep '10
Re: Shooters & Hate Speech
What the leftist dialogue comes down to is controlling speech.
You'll notice they are not saying that they are responsible. It is the right-wing people who criticize the govenment who are responsible. They must be stopped. FOX must be shut down. Any dissent from the leftist point of view is bad.
I think it was Hoyer on one of the Sunday talk shows who wanted to go back to the time when there were three TV news outlets and there was peace in the land. He doesn't recognize leftist bias because it is the one and only version of things. Any possible dissent is wrong and needs to be stifled.
Just watch in the coming days as the rhetoric for shutting down the right becomes even more vocal.
Free speech is the real target here.
Re: Shooters & Hate Speech
Great post, Heather. It will be a struggle to make sure that the emerging facts about Loughner get properly reported. The liberal media desperately wants a different narrative. The lowest of the low (so far at least) appears to be NY Daily News Michael Daly who ran a column saying that Sarah Palin had "blood on her hands."
The issue, as Kenneth, George, and others have pointed out, is how we deal with serious mental illness. It has nothing to do with heated rhetoric or gun control.
Dec '10
Re: Shooters & Hate Speech
Heather Higgins:
Hey, let's even ignore the idea that whatever the effect of heated rhetoric, how it affects an irrational person will have nothing to do with objective norms and standards.
Let's not ignore that.
The Left loves to shake a finger at people and tell us all how we should better behave lest we give others, such as the mentally unstable and unhinged, a motivation for bad behavior. It's the "creating a climate" argument. Such arguments try to shift blame away from the individual (and personal responsibility) and onto "society".
This is exactly the rationale used to try to point a partial finger of blame and responsibility at the US for the actions of mass murdering terrorists.
If Loughner murdered six innocent people, including a nine year old girl, because he was mentally ill and unhinged and was acting irrationally, let's leave it at that.
Trying to find a scintilla of rationality in his motivations implies two things: 1) that normal ordinary people need to modify their behavior lest they motivate some other similar individual to do the same; 2) that he was not behaving entirely irrationally -- his murderous rampage was in part rationally motivated.
May '10
Re: Shooters & Hate Speech
If any legislation is going to come out of this it should be to impose a moritorium on trying to derive motive for at least 72 hours (I'm kidding of course, I think). This obviously had very little or anything to do with rhetoric.
The problem is we are trained by the 24-hour news cycle that there has to be an analysis of everything so we can assign blame to the responsible party. Sometime, these tragedies happen and there really isn't a logical rhyme or reason to it. Political rhetoric has been around since politics have and we don't have mass killings because of it.
The problems is you have the hyper partisans like the Paul Krugmans of the world who appear to be basking in such an event (in the political sense. I'm not suggesting Krugman is cheering the loss of life), so he can say "see, the Right is responsible for this." The truth is stopping all the rhetoric and/or additional gun control laws will not stop this sort of violence. After all, the stricter gun control laws after Columbine didn't stop this event even though we were told it would.
May '10
Re: Shooters & Hate Speech
"Never waste a crisis," Rahm Emmanuel is reported to have said. And when something like the shooting in Tucson is leveraged for political gain, then one comes awfully, sickeningly, close to cheering for the loss of life.