Let’s get this out of the way off the top: The kid who shot 18 people in Tucson is just oddball enough that both sides on various online forums and on cable news are claiming he was working for the other guys. His list of favorite books and his comments about flag-burning are a lightning rod for the righties. Clearly, unless you have a blind spot based on your politics, you can see that with all his talk about the currency, about gold, about the government and other subjects, his sweet spot was right wing conspiracy theories. He’s no liberal, that’s for sure.
But the issue shouldn’t be what he believed, which was clearly not rational no matter how you look at it, but what he used in his attack: A handgun. We need gun control in this country, and we need it twenty years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some of the victims were shot by other people who decided to pull out their guns and “protect” themselves. An armed populace means more dead people, period. But nothing will be done, as nothing was done after the last ten shootings. We will just continue this way until we live in an armed camp, if we don’t already.
Do we pay attention to warning signs? All the evidence says no. I recently watched a newsreel made in 1937, from the March of Time series shown in all the movie theaters, that revealed all the information anybody would need about the frightening things going on in pre-war Germany under Hitler. Nothing was done about it. Germany re-armed, attacked its neighbors, and allied with Italy and Japan to start a full-scale world war, and when the smoke cleared, we had 6 million dead Jews, countless millions of killed and maimed soldiers and civilians, worldwide devastation, two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, and an entire generation militarized and traumatized. We could have stopped it. We could stop this. But we won’t, because we don’t have the political will, and we’re too busy trying to figure out how to pay our bills.
Most of us are also too frightened to speak up, and with mostly good reason. Posting this is as far as I want to go, and who knows whether or not my words will attract the attention of another Jared Lee Loughner, sitting out there somewhere with a gun in his hands, stewing in his own psychotic juices, listening to Fox News and reading conspiracy theories online? If you’re reading these words and you agree, at least try not to cast a vote for anybody with more than a 0% rating from the NRA, because the gun lobby’s control of Congress is public enemy number one. How much damage could Jared Loughner have done with a handful of rocks, or even a knife? He might even have decided not to do it in the first place.
Writer89's Weblog 
The shooter used a 9mm Glock handgun to blast his way onto the front pages. Thanks to the NRA. Sensible people would have blocked the manufacture and sale of these weapons long ago, curtailed what gun shows can sell, who could buy a weapon, how many could be bought, how they had to be registered, and the type of ammo bought, and how much.
In other words for all the three-thumb crowd there are ways to make sure nine-year kids are not shot to death at the local grocery store.
When the person who fired the automatic weapon is charged with the murders and related crimes I suggest there should be another who is also brought up on charges.
That would be the NRA.
The ultimate irony of this is that Judge Roll, who was killed today, opposed background checks for guns. (His decision was reversed on appeal, but it didn’t save him.) Here’s Dahlia Lithwick’s comments about that: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Judge+rules+against+background+checks.-a016373704 Guns don’t kill people, right? To believe that, we have to accept the idea that Loughner INTENDED to kill a judge who wanted to help make it possible for him to get the gun.