If there's a political lesson to be learned from Saturday's shooting deaths in Tucson, it's eluding the partisans on both wings. On the left, many see the attempted assassination of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as the logical result of overheated anti-government rhetoric from the "tea party" movement and conservative pundits. On the right, outrage is just as keenly felt, only it's directed at left-wing critics who seek to score political points from a tragedy that should rightly be blamed on a deranged individual, not a party or philosophy. The real lesson lies somewhere in the middle.
Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old who allegedly killed six and wounded 13 others in addition to Giffords, is by all accounts a highly unstable young man whose political leanings are reflected in his paranoid Internet rants about government thought control via grammar and the necessity of returning to the gold standard. Although such right-wing pundits as Fox News commentator Glenn Beck have elevated similar blather on the gold standard from the lunatic fringe to just the fringe, it's not fair to blame Beck — or Sarah Palin, or the tea party, or Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer — for the massacre. We don't, and may never, understand the forces that drove the alleged shooter, but it's safe to say that his own demons were primarily to blame.
