This is the rather bizarre mugshot of Jared Loughner that was released yesterday afternoon. He has been assigned lawyer Judy Clarke, who defended the Unabomber.
One of the more interesting facts to emerge is that Loughner was expelled from his community college after complaints from classmates that he seemed on the edge of violence.
In the meantime, the Sheriff is being attacked for criticizing right-wing commentators for their over-the-top rhetoric, including conservative icon, Rush Limbaugh. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik stated “The kind of rhetoric that flows from people like Rush Limbaugh, in my judgment he is irresponsible, uses partial information, sometimes wrong information. . . [Limbaugh] attacks people, angers them against government, angers them against elected officials and that kind of behavior in my opinion is not without consequences.” [Update: Limbaugh has reportedly fired back by saying that the Democratic Party supports Loughner and is “attempting to find anybody but him to blame.” Wasn’t he supposed to be Costa Rica?] Reportedly near the scene of the shooting is this billboard:
Sarah Palin is also being criticized for putting a bullseye over Giffords’s district as someone she has “set her sights on” for defeat:
Notably, Palin was previously associated with threats against the President by the Secret Service, here.
Gifford’s husband has also blamed inflammatory rhetoric for the shooting.
For its part, the Brady Campaign, may the following point in a statement from Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence:
“The 22 year-old shooter in Tucson was not allowed to enlist in the military, was asked to leave school, and was considered “very disturbed” (according to former classmates), but that’s not enough to keep someone from legally buying as many guns as they want in America.” For the full statement, click here
One of the more worrisome (and predictable) developments is the proposal of legislation to further criminalize speech, here.
One lives to be of combustible service.
you are correct and it was ment to say you are on fire after I explained the game.
Bdaman,
Tell your mother thank you for the wonderful gift. I really like BVSC and if I’m not mistaken, that’s one of my favorite guitarists playing back-up, Ry Cooder.
I shall not, in this comment, refer specifically to any of the prior comments, because I choose to not “play the game” which I find, after decades of research effort, “unbalances” people.
The first time I encountered someone whose life somewhat resembled that of Jared Loughner was in 1953. James Allan Francis Duranty, age 14, murdered the couple who lived next door to the west, Grace and Sumner Harris. Sumner was the editor/ publisher of the Door County Advocate. As reported in the Tuscaloosa (Alabama) News of July 3, 1953, of James Duranty, “The boy calmly admits the bloody killings but says he does not know why he did them.” That double murder got national attention.
The Harris’s home was less than a block from where I lived, Jimmy Durante had bullied me many times, until I began going to and from school by a long and circuitous route through Sturgeon Bay which kept me from encountering him.
Sumner and Grace were murdered late on July 29, 1953. Just three days before, my parents and I were invited to an evening for dinner and watching color slides of their recent trip to Acapulco, Mexico. Grace had recently begun smoking filter cigarettes and tried to light the filter about half of the time. Grace and Sumner were members of Hope Church in Sturgeon Bay, my dad was the Hope Church minister. James Duranty used a hunting knife to murder Grace and then, when he came home in a rush, Sumner. A common kitchen knife, if reasonably sharp, might have worked about as well as the hunting knife did.
The second time I encountered someone whose life somewhat resembled that of Jared Loughner was in 1993. James Cinelli had been a member and somewhat of a leader in the Oak Park Social Club before it was disbanded in 1993, as part of an effort by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Oak Park and River Forest (NAMI-OPRF) to establish an “Drop-In Center” on Oak Park Avenue, just north of the Eisenhower Expressway. In working with other agencies in Oak Park, NAMI-OPRF decided that leaders for the Drop-In Center would need to take training from another agency, which I did because I sought to become one of the community member leaders in the Drop-In Center. Cinelli thought he needed no training, a trait I commonly notice in folks who set of my sociopath detector. I observed two NAMI-OPRF members who were parents of chronically-mentally-ill adults as though castigate Cinelli for not welcoming the required training, and Cinelli’s response was to walk out and start setting fires within a few days in the building where he lived. The third fire killed Margaret Cortino and (age 47) and Beatrice Small (age 89).
Margaret Cortino and I were “partner catechists” in “Faith and Fellowship” an outreach activity to mentally ill people at St. Catherine of Sienna – St. Lucy Parish, in Oak Park. As part of my work as Community Projects Chairman for the Oak Park Lions Club, I had met Beatrice Small, who needed financial help with vision issues.
Gun control and/or ammunition control, no matter how effective, will not stop people from having hunting knives or kitchen knives, or stop people from having ways to light a candle in the darkness.
When I worked as a repairman in Chicago at 1201 West Washington Blvd, in the Service Department of Allied Radio Corporation, William Eiland, a friend of mine who also worked there and lived not far from where I lived would stop by to give me a ride, as I could not afford to have an automobile, to chat with each other on our way to and from the salt mine. Bill had a car, yet some of use who lived in the ghetto could not afford the best of cars. Bill, in the winter, would get a shovel of coals from the furnace in the building where he lived and would put the coals under the oil pan of his car, to warm the engine so it would start. Because the radiator leaked and he could not afford to replace it, and could not afford proper anti-freeze, Bill got rock salt and dissolved it in a bucket of water as coolant, so the engine, once started, would not stop before we arrived at the salt mine parking lot across the street from 1201 W. Washington Blvd. Before leaving in the morning, he put a second bucket, covered, in the back of the car for the trip back home.
One day, Bill was helping a family relative at the relative’s place of business. In came a loaded handgun which was fired, and Bill was as dead as dead can be. Gun control and/or ammunition control, if sufficiently effective, can plausibly stop people from being killed by ammunition activated by guns.
One day, February 10, 1996, Michael Harris and his wife, Shelly Dukes, were headed for her job in Brussels, Wisconsin. Black ice, a fully loaded gravel truck, defective welds in the Mercury Sable that Michael and Shelly were intending a conveyance to her job, and they were killed. I knew them, also. Son and daughter-in-law.
Gun control, ammunition control, knife control, and fire-starter-device control will not prevent defective spot welds from killing people in defectively-welded automobiles.
Just maybe, there is a root problem not yet well fathomed by humanity. The killing of people through proximate causes such as bullets fired from guns, heads nearly severed by knives, fires set by serial arsonists, and corporations who, in heeding the corporate mandates for profits first, make lethal automobiles; all those and more may be the proximate symptoms of a process active in human brains which adequate understanding of human brain function just might usefully unriddle, and just might eventually do so effectively.
James Duranty had been rejected as a seminary student because of poor grades, so the story has it. James Cinelli had been rejected by two parents at the Drop-In Center. Jared Loughner was rejected by the Army and by people at school.
I had talked with James Duranty and James Cinelli. I knew something of them, I had learned in talking with them that they had experienced their childhoods as being of mainly authoritarian methods. Please note that I am not suggesting, nor not suggesting, that Jared’s parents were of the authoritarian school of parenting. Parenting is a social activity, a role in which whoever parents presumes to have superior understanding through life experiences than has the one being parented. I have not talked with Jared Loughner; I have read some of what he put on the Internet. On reading through the words Jared put on the Internet, the only pattern I find in my past experience of such patterns, is, his inner experience of being parented by society, as expressed in the words I have repeatedly read, corresponds in my life experience, exclusively to the subjective experience of authoritarian parenting.
Authoritarian parenting (as, “Do what I tell you to do, or else…”) results in children who, to minimize punishment, become passive, and the more the authoritarian punishments for disobedience are, the more passive the authoritarian-parented child tends to become. Alas, Authoritarian parenting is itself passive-aggressive parenting, and children who are taught the ways of passive-aggression well tend to become passive until their life situation overwhelms them, and they may sometimes “snap” into psychotic aggression.
The preventive, as I have thus far observed, to raising a child to become passive-aggressive as the core process of authoritarianism, is Authoritative-Reciprocal parenting, which is how I was raised from when I was born. My validity as a person was never in question in my parents, and therefore, never in question in myself.
The alternative to being a valid person is being an invalid person.
Invalidating a child through authoritarian parenting methods invalidates the child, this invalidation manifests itself in the self-hatred of passive-aggressive self-modeling, with a resulting self imago which is vulnerable to rejection, and social rejection may lead an invalidated person to invalidate being passive, leaving only aggression within the person’s learned repertoire of mental mechanisms for dealing with self-hatred.
From time to time, a person who became an invalid through a sufficient sequence of invalidating events, will express the invalidation by acting as an invalid, invalid the sense of mentally ill.
Methinks, until we, as individuals and as society, recognize the mechanism of authoritarianism as invalidation of personhood, and replace invalidation with affirming the validity of every person, regardless of a person’s dispositional circumstances, there will be an endless sequence of persons invalidated by authoritarianism and some of such persons will be stressed past the breaking point, and the game of vengeful retaliation will continue until we stop forcing it upon ourselves or there is no one left to force it on anyone because we have solved the problem as Jared Loughner may have attempted to solve it. Methinks it really did not work yet for him, why would it really work for anyone else?
People I know were good friends of James Duranty’s siblings. At one time, during the prodromal phase of what threatened to become a violently aggressive psychotic, break, our son, Michael threatened to get people he knew to come to our house and kill our daughter while my wife and I watched, then my wife or me, then the other of us. He was being torn between his authoritarian experiences as a foster child and the authoritative-reciprocal approach in our home. After some time as a psychiatric inpatient, Michael decided to learn how to replace his authoritarian-parenting-indoctrinated methods with others of authoritative-reciprocal form. Then the car exploded, defective welds being the obvious proximate cause.
If the ultimate cause of passive-aggressive parenting and its invalidation of a child who becomes, as an adult, a mental invalid, and if the process of invalidating a child is blaming the child for things which happen which truthfully are of situational aspects not fully within the child’s actual locus of control, then it may be the construct of blaming which is to blame, which would result in there being nothing to truthfully blame.
Blaming blame is, methinks, as a hypothetical analogy, like explaining evolution as the survival of the fittest, which is a circularity without content, as we learn after the fact what was fittest in a particular situation by its having survived. Survival of the fittest is really survival of the survivors, i.e. a tautology. Blaming blame is a tautology, also?
The verbal sparring, with even mildly damaging hurled epithets, is of the process which drives folks like Jimmy Duranty or James Cinelli toward acting out what cannot otherwise be told.
Is “adversarial” anything but a misunderstood synonym for “evil”? Authoritarianism is inextricably adversarial.
I observe that the authoritative-reciprocal approach excludes the authoritarian approach.
Alas, merely dealing with proximate causes is palliation of symptoms of a process which will take on other symptoms endlessly until it is actually resolved.
The alternative to being an invalid person is being a valid person.
A mentally ill person is an invalid.
I choose to invalidate no one. I seek not to be an invalid nor to drive anyone else toward becoming an invalid.
I hold authoritarianism as though in contempt for the ruination it brings into people and their lives.
Authoritarianism is the foster parent of child abuse.
Buddha my mother says this is for you.
Bdaman,
In re Jeopardy.
I have a “thing” about being on television. Always have. I don’t find it exciting. I find it creepy. Or as I answered this question once before IRL, “Silly rabbit! TV is for watching, not being on.” It’s one of my very few completely irrational motivators. And I know it’s irrational. I have no problem being on stage or in print. I have no issue with the idea of radio. But I guess the closest thing I can compare it to is the aversion some primitive African tribes showed to cameras when they were first introduced. The tribesmen felt that cameras “stole their spirit”. I don’t particularly like having my picture taken either for that matter. I’ll do it, but I don’t like it.
Glad your mom is home and well fed.
Around 5:00 pm, Lennon and Ono left The Dakota for a recording session at Record Plant Studios. As they walked towards their limousine on the curb, Chapman shook hands with Lennon and held out a copy of Lennon’s new album, Double Fantasy, for him to sign.[12] Photographer Paul Goresh was present when Lennon signed Chapman’s album and took a photo of the event.[13] Chapman reported that, “At that point my big part won and I wanted to go back to my hotel, but I couldn’t. I waited until he came back. He knew where the ducks went in winter, and I needed to know this.”
“Around 10:49 pm, the Lennons’ limousine returned to the Dakota. At the curb, Lennon and Ono got out, passed by Chapman and walked toward the archway entrance of the building’s courtyard. From the street behind them, Chapman fired five hollow point bullets from a .38 special revolver, four of which hit Lennon in the back and left shoulder.
Chapman remained at the scene, took out his copy of The Catcher in the Rye and read it until the police arrived.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_David_Chapman
“I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.”
“Hey, listen,” I said. “You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over?”
“The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come a round in a truck or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves–go south or something?”
“What it was, it was partly frozen and partly not frozen. But I didn’t see any ducks around. I walked all around the whole damn lake–I damn near fell in once, in fact–but I didn’t see a single duck.”
Catcher In The Rye
Gyges,
I had to deal with His PR department all through Catholic grade school! They were very “convincing”!
Bdaman, Good news. How lucky she is to have you and your sister. I work with so many people who are all alone. (The food sounds oh, so good… 🙂 … and she probably needs a lot of rest.)
Rafflaw,
Honestly, Jesus might have been a creepy cult leader or a great teacher; we only know what his PR department told us.
Bdaman:
he turned us down, hopefully Alec will not be as unfortunate.
Gyges,
You are right that the nonsense from the Right is claiming every evil or sick person in history was a liberal. You know, like that guy named Jesus.
Buddha as smart as you are how come you never sent your application in to Jeopardy?
She is Anon Nurse she’s sitting right beside me at the moment, she just got up from a nap. I picked her up around noon today to stay at my house for a few days to give my sister a much needed break. As soon as she sat down I gave her a bowl of broccoli cheese soup followed by smoke chicken breast with veggies and for dessert blueberry pie with whip cream 🙂 I think it made her sleepy.
Swarthmore Mom,nice link about that great state of Arizona cutting the mental health budget by 50%. I think they want to follow Reagans lead from the 80’s when he defunded scores of mental health facilities and basically put many ill people in the streets.
Buddha and BDAman,
Oh, this is fun.
Torquemada inspired by Jesus
Jeffery Donner inspired by hunger
Therefore Jesus and Winter are both bad. Right?
And here’s a bonus question
Charles J. Guiteau inspired by not getting a Federal job.
Bdaman,
I hope that your mother is on the mend. As others have said, don’t blame yourself. (I’ve been swamped with work and other business –it’s a busy time.) You’re correct — “TheBlaze” is Beck’s site, I gather…, but make no mistake, I’m not a fan. 🙂
I’ll play your little game . . .
The Italian Populace inspired by Mussolini’s Fascism.
John Wilkes Booth inspired by the Confederacy.
Sirhan Sirhan inspired by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What is “Politically Motivated Non-seqiturs Made By Cooks”?
That’s right! The topic is yours . . .
I’ll take “Mad Motives” for $300, Alex.
Son of Sam inspired by a dog channeling Satan.
The Hillside Stranglers inspired by their own sexual sadism.
The Zodiac Killer inspired by “collecting slaves for his afterlife”.
What is “all of these people are crazy as a soup sandwich?”
That is correct! You are on a roll . . .
I’ll take “Another Crap Posts From Bdaman” for $500, Alex.
Will elections cure the disease that shows up mostly during elections?
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2010/11/will-elections-cure-disease.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/11/pima-county-mental-health-services_n_807522.html The state of Arizona cut 50% off Pima county’s mental health care rolls in 2010.