Even though the political divide and partisan rhetoric on all sides is somewhat at all all time high now, I find it difficult to blame that for this latest Arizona shootout.
I blame it on the lone gunman and there is no making sense out of a nut. There are thousand if not hundreds of thousand of such in the USA at any one given time. Sure we can say that the Arizona shooter showed all the classic signs, social isolation, moving away from all his previous friends, disturbing outbursts, but still not all that different than many such cases. The point is and remains that most of such somewhat nutty people never become a threat, and usually later straighten up and reorient.
But in the case of the Arizona shooter we have a case where everyone and their brother and law is now saying we should have known this was a coming and stopped him before. And down that road is a police state.
As for all the free floating hate speech and lack of logic pundits, I just think they are not too influential in the twisted logic of an actual about to use violence nut. We can maybe refer back to John Hinkley, the fellow who wounded Ronald Reagan, and we later find that somehow Hinkley though if he killed someone any one important, the movie star Brooke Shields would suddenly love him. Nor did this recent shooter's elevator seeming go to the top, we might say he was targeting the democratic congresswoman, but once he seemingly killed her, why did he not simply leave mission accomplished? But no, he did no such thing, and simply started shooting everyone around him, a Republican Federal judge, and 16 more people, including a nine year girl. And would have shot more but finally got tackled while trying to change clips. That is not the work of a nut with a focused mind and clear target, its an act of total violent senseless killing and nothing more. If he did not pick a democratic congresswoman to initially target he would have picked someone anyone else.