I was at my wife and son's Tae Kwon Do class when I checked my blackberry and saw the horriffic news...20 people shot, seven dead including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and an alleged shooter captured at the scene. I immediately called my studios to see if the weekend anchor was on top of the story and she was, as the news director had already given her some direction on the story and another reporter had already been dispatched to make the hour-and-a-half drive to Tucson.
As fast as this response was, though, the people looking to turn this tragedy to their political or philosophical advantage were even faster. Firstly, we had erroneous reports that Giffords was already dead in an effort to be first with the most sensational angle on the story. The problem was, though, that she was not dead and was in the beginning of a remarkable recovery even as my colleagues were writing her obituary. Secondly, we were told that accused shooter Jared Lee Loughner was a right-wing gun nut with a history of mental problems who only had such a powerful handgun capable of shooting so many people because the federal assault weapons ban had lapsed and Arizona's gun laws are too lax. The problem there is that he is, in fact, politically inclined to the Left and had never been officially diagnosed as mentally ill or been tagged as a prohibited possessor, and his weapon of choice was a pistol, not an assault weapon so he would legally have been able to buy this weapon in many other states. But, most importantly, the shootings prompted a cry from all corners that our civil discourse was no longer civil and the heated rhetoric we hear from talk radio and cable television (not to mention from the floors of both the House of Representatives and Senate) had directly led to this unbalanced person taking matters into his own hands and to attempt to silence Giffords and others who do not agree with his paranoid political philosophy. The problem there is that it was not the level of political discourse that led Loughner to pull the trigger that fateful Saturday morning in Tucson, but it was his isolated malignancy that caused all the pain.
But that simple truth, that Loughner is a single crazy man who decided to shoot up a political gathering on a beautiful Arizona day, is now being used to dramatically alter the American political landscape and to kill its vibrancy of debate and disagreement, sterilizing it and thereby imposing the very intolerance of differing opinions that is being decried by the people effecting the change. We are now told that we can not use words like "kill", "target" or "aim", metaphorically, anymore because they inflame passions and plant ideas in crazy people's heads that will drive them to murder innocents. It was George Orwell who showed us in 1984 that if you control language you control thought. We cannot conceive of ideas beyond those which we can put into words and for every word we eliminate from the ongoing discussion that is America we eliminate another idea from our collective consciousness.
It is important to remember that our nation was founded on the core belief that anyone that had a mind to speak should be able to do so freely. The U.S. Supreme court has had to impose reasonable limits on speech, like the famous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" standard to ensure the right to freely speak does not infringe on the right to be secure in one's person, but that same court has ruled repeatedly that political speech is the most protected form of speech and that is the very speech threatened by all these calls for civility. The real aim of those calling for more polite discourse is not the restore comity, though. Their real aim is to stifle the opposition from a position of moral superiority and to thereby enhance their own political power and to perpetuate it as even more contentious issues, like illegal immigration or difficult budget decisions come to the fore.
I was touched by these tragedies. I drove down to cover President Barack Obama's speech at the memorial service and I visited the Safeway store where the shootings occurred almost a week prior, with the FBI investigators still there and the yellow crime scene tape still cordoning off the scene from the public. I visited Gabrielle Giffords' offices where somber workers, dressed in black, prepared to feel sad for those killed but also rejoice in the miraculous recovery Giffords was making, where hundreds if not thousands of cards, letters, candles and stuffed toys paid tribute to the victims and to the humanity of Tuscsonans. I sat on the floor of the University of Arizona's McKale Center and watched the President eloquently call for us all to be better to one another and I heard the roar of the 14,000 people there who were treating the memorial as more pep rally than service for the dead and the living.
I have also seen how little things are really changing in these weeks after the shootings. After the call for a more civil political discourse, the very state politicians who promised to change their ways are telling me, and other reporters, now that the Governor is deceiving voters over the state budget and that she is "balancing it on the backs of the poor and the vulnerable". For better, or worse, we have an adversarial political system where competing ideas are debated and examined and the people then decide which of those is best for the country. But that system cannot work if the free flow of debate over those ideas is hampered by artificial constraints on how we present the arguments on either side of any political question. This is a system that has served us well for more than 200 years as a nation and for more than 2,000 years through the evolution of Western Civilization. If we let ourselves retreat from bravely tackling the issues of the day for fear of the confrontation and friction that can cause, then Jaren Lee Loughner will have done far more damage in those few seconds of mayhem than he could have ever imagined.
