The Arizona Shooting - Can we Blame the Shooter?

Television news and the internet were ablaze Saturday with reports of the shooting in Arizona and in fact, it is still the top story today. The story is a sad one. A federal Judge, a 9 year old girl and others were fatally shot. The Congresswoman from that Arizona district, Gabrielle Gifford is fighting for her life today. All this because some wacked out kid went on a shooting rampage. It is a horrible story and we all feel for the victims and their families.

While the investigation continues, the details of this story are found all over the internet. My intent here is not just to tell about the story but to delve into how this story is being told.

The hype and bloviating is beyond reasonable.  Everyone from current news anchors and talking heads to bloggers and Hollywood-has -beens are tweeting, blogging or giving speeches about their take on the blame game already in full swing regarding this shooting.  It is even being reported that President Obama has been advised by a veteran Democratic Operative, to carefully and forcefully pin this on the Tea Party, just like Clinton pinned the Oklahoma bombing on the militia and anti-government sentiment.

Paul Krugman is a writer at the New York Times. He freely admits at the time he issued his statement, that there is no evidence that the shooting was political but he is going to assume it was and further assume that the shooting was in response to Gifford’s seat being on Sarah Palins list of Democratic held seats that were targeted for Tea Party attention last year.

On the map of the targeted seats, each seat in contention was spotlighted by crosshairs. So apparently Mr. Krugman did some math and decided that 2 plus 2 equals 5. Does he really believe Sarah Palin wanted these deaths? Wanted this bloodshed? Or, that she should have somehow concluded that this would happen?

Did someone not do all of their homework and know that the DailyKos also put a bulls eye on Congresswoman Gifford’s seat back in June of 2008 for the very same reason, to target her seat for a more netter candidate. Ms Palin removed her map hours after the shooting and issued condolences. But she wasn’t the only one removing items from websites, it seems the DailyKos removed some comments attacking Ms Gifford as well for not being left enough. The founder of the site simple tweeted, “Mission accomplished Sarah Palin,” as though this shooting was Palin’s intent all along.

Jane Fonda puts it out there via Twitter, for the whole world to see that Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are to blame and adds Glenn Beck, as an afterthought, to be at fault as well.

John Lewis, of The Nation, writes that Palin put a target on Gifford’s district and that is was only a matter of time before someone followed up on that.

Keith Olberman is a liberal commentator on MSNBC who clearly speaks out of both sides of his mouth. While on one hand he pleads for the American people to show more restraint in their debates proceeds to spend the rest of his show blaming Palin, the GOP and the conservative commentators, without any proof, for the actions of the gunman in Arizona, raising the rhetoric to new heights.

With just a little bit of research, these mouthpieces would know that the shooter was not a sympathizer of right wing conservatism. He was a real left leaning liberal. In fact, his favorite books are “Mein Kampf” and the “The Communist Manifesto.” We are clearly not looking at a Conservative sympathizer. Acquaintances of the shooter describe him as a loner and a political radical, left wing, quite liberal and oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy. He dressed in goth and was called a pothead. But this information was not included in the blame game being played out all over the news and the internet. They only told you what they wanted you to think.

Where in the rules of this blame game does it say that it is not the fault of the person doing the shooting?

Do words really murder people?

It gets a little murky when we say that words have such deadly consequences. Are Mr. Olberman and Mr. Krugman are trying to say that people are not smart enough to realize that war terminologies commonly used in both political elections and battlefields are just words?

What happens to Freedom of Speech when the association between words, perhaps spoken years ago, can be found to be complicit in criminal actions taken today?

Is all this attention really about the story of the Arizona shooting or is more at play here hidden just under the surface?

With almost all of the liberal media pointing the blame towards Conservatives without any proof to back them up, we must ask ourselves if they are using this tragedy as yet another opportunity to try and silence the conservative voices on the rise throughout the country.

On the heels of the Net Neutrality, and the rhetoric over the Fair Doctrine still fresh in our minds, we need to be aware of the push by the liberal media for censorship of conservative views on television and the internet. Such disingenuousness could be holding the spark that the anti-free speech movement is looking for.