Tucson shootings: Mental illness, not rhetoric, at root of more political assassinations historically
It's tempting in the angry aftermath of deadly moments such as Saturday's shooting of 20 people in Tucson to seize on any convenient, seemingly credible explanation for the inexplicable.
How could someone so young take it upon himself to lash out lethally to kill six innocent people and wound 14 others, all presumably unknown to him, on a sunny Saturday by a grocery ironically named Safeway?
At his initial news conference Saturday, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik could not offer much specific information about the incident, including the accused's name or motive.
However, the 74-year-old sheriff was somehow repeatedly certain the incident had something to do with overheated political rhetoric in his state and in America today, where grown-ups in public life call each other liars and hostage-takers. While others employ even more vicious vitriol hiding behind the convenient anonymity of the Internet.
While that theory may gain broad traction, at least in these initial days, a look back at prominent assassinations and attempts in U.S. history finds far different common patterns -- more personal or ...
Arizona has been a politically conservative state for generations. But anyone studying the writings and videos of the accused, Jared Lee Loughner, is hard-pressed to find any coherence, let alone a political one either way.
Friends on Twitter said Loughner was "left-wing" and "a pothead." Loughner claimed to admire both the "Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf." Before his expulsion from college, classmates said, he was given to unprovoked outbursts in class.
His writing of conscious dreaming is gibberish. His lonely video of a U.S. flag-burning in the desert is amateurish, showing a young male in a hoodie, garbage bag and mask shuffling about like a senior citizen. The Army rejected him. Someone who could likely use some treatment, but one problem with these awful incidents is that, in hindsight, most involve mental cases. However, obviously not all mental cases take such deadly action.
The sheriff has declared that his friend Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was the target, although her name does not appear in the rantings so far uncovered. A former Republican, Giffords was considered a Blue Dog Democrat, one who voted in favor of President Barack Obama's healthcare legislation yet against Nancy Pelosi as her party's leader for the 112th Congress.
The shooter attacked Giffords first. But then why fire nearly 20 more times? Unless the goal was to make a murderous media splash using Gifford and numerous other deaths as the guaranteed ignition point to finally be noticed, even if notoriously. Loughner's friends also call him a loner, five letters that come up consistently in American history.
Jan. 30, 1835: Richard Lawrence aims two flintlock pistols at President Andrew Jackson. They misfire. A former general, Jackson proceeds to beat the would-be assassin senseless with the presidential cane. Lawrence was confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life.
April 14, 1865: Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth. Sic semper tyrannis. (See Civil War.)
July 2, 1881: Having written a speech supporting the successful election of James Garfield, Charles Guiteau felt he deserved a job in the new administration, although said speech was never actually given.
His job application was repeatedly rebuffed, so Guiteau heard the call to execute the ungrateful chief executive. Garfield succumbed to infections 11 weeks after the shooting. Guiteau succumbed to hanging the next summer.
Sept. 6, 1901: President William McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., when Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist who had been tracking the president's movements, caught up with him. He shot him twice.
McKinley died eight days later of surgical complications. Czolgosz, who refused to cooperate with his attorney, was convicted and, justice being somewhat swifter in the early 1900s, was electrocuted the next month.
Oct. 13, 1912: Former President Theodore Roosevelt was again seeking the White House when his famed verbosity saved a life -- his. In Milwaukee, a saloon keeper named John Schrank pumped a .38-caliber bullet into the politician's body. However, TR's folded 50-page speech and metal eyeglass case slowed the projectile. Roosevelt insisted on finishing his address.
Then, recalling McKinley's deadly surgical complications that brought TR into office, he opted to live with the bullet in his body the remaining years of his life, which ended in 1919. Schrank, who claimed that McKinley's ghost had ordered the assassination, was institutionalized until his death in 1943.
Feb. 15, 1933: In Miami, Democrat President-elect Franklin Roosevelt was talking with Mayor Anton Cermak (left in earlier photo above), a Bohemian immigrant who was the political architect of the Chicago Democratic machine.
Also in the waterfront crowd that day was another immigrant, Giuseppe Zangara, who hated all kinds of politicians, especially prominent ones, and had reportedly tracked outgoing Republican President Herbert Hoover. Zangara got off several shots before being subdued by crowd members. The bullets hit Cermak and four others. Cermak died in a hospital bed in March; Zangara the same month but in an electric chair.
Roosevelt was the presumed target, although some noted that the death of a prominent political foe like Cermak did not exactly hurt the business of Chicago mobster Al Capone.
Nov. 1, 1950: An attempted assassination of President Harry Truman by two Puerto Rican independence advocates fails but takes the lives of two White House guards.
March 1, 1954: Four more Puerto Rican independence activists open up from the House gallery during debate on an immigration bill. Five representatives are wounded. The shooters receive 70-year sentences but are released in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter in apparent exchange for Cuba's Fidel Castro freeing some captured CIA agents.
Nov. 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas. The accused, Lee Harvey Oswald, is himself assassinated by Jack Ruby, also now dead.
June 5, 1968: Aggrieved over Robert Kennedy's support for Israel, Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan fatally shoots the campaigning New York senator in a kitchen pantry of Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel.
May 15, 1972: Arthur Bremer grew up in a dysfunctional Milwaukee household where he pretended to live in a TV family with no verbal or physical abuse. He had no friends, changed jobs frequently. After a 1971 arrest for carrying a concealed weapon, he is declared mentally ill but sane and undergoes some weeks of therapy.
Early in 1972 he tells his diary he will shoot either Richard Nixon or George Wallace "to do something bold and dramatic" to make "a statement of my manhood for the world to see."
After studying Sirhan's story and tracking Wallace for weeks, Bremer accomplishes that in Maryland at a political appearance in a shopping center.
Wallace was paralyzed from the waist down. A jury rejected Bremer's insanity defense. He got 63 years, reduced to 53, was released after 35 and is on parole until 2025.
1975: At least two attempts on President Gerald Ford's life, both by women and both in Northern California: Lynette Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore. Fromme, a member of the notorious Manson family, and Moore, who later said she'd been "blinded" by radical political beliefs, both received life sentences. However, both have been released, Moore in 2007 and Fromme in 2009.
March 30, 1980: John Hinckley had become obsessed first with the violent movie "Taxi Driver," the story of a would-be presidential assassin based on the story of Bremer's attempted Wallace killing. Hinckley also fixated on an actress in that film, Jodie Foster.
Rejected and despite treatment for mental illness, Hinckley devised several bizarre plots to gain her attention, including an airplane hijacking and committing suicide in front of her, before settling on a presidential murder.
He trailed Democrat Carter and then shot newly installed Republican President Ronald Reagan, among others, at the side door to the Washington Hilton. Hinckley remains institutionalized. And you may have noticed since that gloomy D.C. day, there are no more videos of presidents entering or leaving regular hotel doors. That's because the most powerful elected official in the world now comes and goes through the freight elevators and secure basements with the reeking garbage dumpsters.
July 24, 1998: Two days after shotgunning a dozen cats at his grandmother's house in Illinois, Russell Weston Jr. charged into the U.S. Capitol firing, presumably hunting members of Congress that he hated. Weston, who had previously been treated as a paranoid schizophrenic, exchanged fire with Capitol police, killing two officers before being wounded. He remains, untried, in a mental institution.
In case you champion or fear more gun control attempts as a result of the Tucson shootings, Gary Langer, the numbers maestro for ABC News, points out that more limits have not been the typical result of previous notorious shootings.
-- Andrew Malcolm
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Photos, from top: A 9mm Glock similar to the one used in the Tucson shootings; James Palka / Associated Press. A man believed to be Jared Lee Loughner in a MySpace photo; Reuters. President Teddy Roosevelt speaking, 1905; PBS. Then-Gov. Franklin Roosevelt at the 1932 World Series with Anton Cermak, left, and son James; Associated Press. Bremer's hand with the pistol fires at Wallace, 1972, Maryland; Associated Press. An image of Robert De Niro from the movie "Taxi Driver" (based on the Bremer story that inspired John Hinckley to shoot President Reagan). Reagan waves a second before Hinckley fires from the crowd in the background; RonaldReagan.com
If one has never been treated for mental illness, who makes the diagnosis when something happens?
Media reports say written evidence by the shooter states he planned ahead. Would the ability to plan ahead qualify as mental illness? did he become "mentally ill" only after he acted?
Posted by: Ann Burchfield | January 10, 2011 at 03:54 AM
And. we demand the restoration of AB3632 mental health funding for our youth. Otherwise, we will be responsible for the new Jareds of the world.
Posted by: Bill | January 10, 2011 at 03:59 AM
Timothy McVae is conspicuously, and conveniently, absent from your list.
Posted by: Mark Smith | January 10, 2011 at 05:41 AM
How many Republicans have tried to kill a President, VP or Congress member? I know that Democrat Preston Brooks attacked Republican Senator Charles Summer in 1856 when the Democrats were trying to preserve slavery.
Posted by: JohnMcGourty | January 10, 2011 at 05:58 AM
The person who committed the awful acts in Tucson was mentally deranged and we need to stop trying to assign blame to a political party, cable tv show, or lobby. When a mentally ill student shoots other students the Left blames either the gun lobby or the manufacturers of video games but never the perpertrator. It is always someone elses fault. The fault for what happened lies with one person - the evil man who started shooting and killing innocent people at Representative Gifford's meeting. He should receive the harshest penalty the law allows.
If all those who are shouting at the rooftops screaming at the Republicans and Fox News ever read some of the comments routinely made on Capital Hill over the past fifty years they would find there was little difference from the rhetoric we hear today. Tip O'Neill the former Democratic speaker of the House used to excoriate Reagan on the House floor and then go golfing with him on the weekends. We need to assign blame where the blame lies - with unbalanced, deranged people who would carry out horrible acts of violence no matter what the political rhetoric is.
Posted by: Mark Jeffery Koch | January 10, 2011 at 06:21 AM
The Right Wing is busy claiming this guy was a liberal, though he was a registered independent who wanted to join the army and wanted to shoot guns. Not liberal tendencies. He may have been in high school, but not now. I don't think he was very political or Tea Party, but he definitely did not like the "current administration" (that was in the online diatribe), and his talk about currency is a theme of many in the Tea Party. He was definitely anti-government and neighbors have said that his father was very argumentative person. Do we know his father's political persuasion or viewing habits? The point is, this kid was mentally ill, and the problem with the violent political discourse is how it can influence unstable people. There is always someone out there with the potential to follow orders that are murderous, even when not really intended by the politician. It is so easy to incite riot in sane people... it must be easier to do it in unstable people.
Posted by: WA | January 10, 2011 at 06:30 AM
And it seems his crazy rantings about grammar may come from David Wynn Miller a far right fellow who has the same ideas about grammar and how it will help you evade taxes by turning your name into a prepositional phrase. So perhaps it isn't mental illness at all that drove this kid.
Posted by: WA | January 10, 2011 at 06:46 AM
1. "Friends on Twitter said Loughner was "left-wing" and "a pothead."
Who are these "friends"? The only reported "friend" discussing Loughner on Twitter is Catie Parker, a high school acquaintance of Loughner's. A "friend" has now become "friends" in the comments of conservatives all over the Internet. Reading Catie Parker's twitter, it's easy to conclude that what she thinks of as "liberal" is what many would think of as libertarian. It's also easy to conclude that Loughner was trying to "chat up" Parker and saying what he thought she wanted him to say.
2. "The sheriff has declared that his friend Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was the target, although her name does not appear in the rantings so far uncovered."
A search of Loughner's home has discivered evidence containing her name.
3. "The shooter attacked Giffords first. But then why fire nearly 18 more times?"
We could ask Timothy McVeigh if he were still alive. If Loughner saw Giffords as the figure of the government he rejected, he could have viewed those attending her political event as equally complicit.
Speaking of rhetoric, this article adopts a standard rhetorical strategy, the false antithesis. Either Loughner's action were politically motivated or he's crazy. It doesn't have to be an either or. As Sheriff Dupnik was careful to say, violent rhetoric is dangerous when it creates a poisonous atmosphere for unstable individuals. Violent rhetoric is unlikely to have an effect when addressed to an audience of Ghandis', but we don't live in that world (especially in the United States and especially in Arizona).
Posted by: ThRochon | January 10, 2011 at 07:07 AM
Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of the ACLU. Therefore, according to the logic of the Democrats, the ACLU was responsible for the death of JFK.
Posted by: Kazooskibum | January 10, 2011 at 07:34 AM
Great article, uses the facts to put this event in historical perspective.
Posted by: Mitchell Young | January 10, 2011 at 07:44 AM
I agree with your statements that it primarily this persons mental stated that caused him to do this. But, I wanted to say thst the medias attempts to tie him the the right wing radicals will most likely backfire on them. So far from his writings, readings and people who knew him is political leanings were mostly left. the media should concentrate on reporting the news not making it up for a headline.
Posted by: Lee | January 10, 2011 at 09:53 AM
They sure know how to milk a story in the loony lefty strategy rooms at CNN.
The Yellins,Crowley and other third rate reporters are dumping non-stop on
Sarah Palin,republicans and the tea party,while at the same time demanding
an end to political uncivility.It was good to see sen. Lamar Alexander put that
democrat mouthpiece Candy Crowly in her place.Acute hysteria is blatant on
all liberal blogs and other media.The ticket needs to be comended for its
high ethics in journalism.
Posted by: CNN Vitriol | January 10, 2011 at 10:03 AM
Well said! Thank you!
Posted by: Amarissa | January 10, 2011 at 11:09 AM
Jared Loughner had previously made death threats against people in Pima County, including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When the Pima County Sheriff's Office was informed, Sheriff Dupnik’s deputies wrongly assured the victims that he was being well managed by the mental health system. It was also suggested that the further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it would solve. Was Jared Loughner’s mother, Amy Loughner, employed as a Natural Resource specialist for the Pima County Parks and Recreation a factor?
The FAILURE lies on Sheriff Dupnik failing to investigate fully and assure that Loughner did not have access to lethal weapons and received the mental health care he obviously NEEDED. This is an unacceptable failure by the Sheriff.
Every victim of his threats must also be wondering if this tragedy could have been prevented if Sheriff Dupnik had been more aggressive in pursuing charges against Mr. Loughner. Perhaps with a felony conviction he would never have been able to lawfully buy weapon he used to strike down the lives of six people and decimate 14 more.
This was not an act of politics. This was an act of a mentally disturbed young man hell bent on getting his 15 minutes of infamy. The Pima County Sheriff's Department was aware of his violent nature and they failed to act appropriately. This tragedy leads right back to Sheriff Dupnik’s gross negligence and all the spin in the world is not going to change that fact.
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Posted by: Lentenlands | January 10, 2011 at 02:27 PM
Latest reports say the suspect was a volunteer at an animal clinic.,and also
a pothead lefty extreemist,probably a registered member of PETA. A far cry
from a conservative,Palin influenced tea bagger that is beeing portrayed by
CNN and the rest of the lame-stream media.Jessica Yellin and Crowley have
lost all credibility if they ever had any.They should get the Rick Sanchez
treatment for incendiary and bogus propaganda.
Posted by: Marie-Chantal Olberman | January 10, 2011 at 02:41 PM
All the political demagoguery spewed by the sherrif cant mask his dereliction
of duty.He had all the facts necessary to stop the shooter from owning firearms and never lifted a finger to enforce the states gun laws.Now adding
insult to injury,he just echos the leftist hysteria.
Posted by: Dupnik needs to retire | January 10, 2011 at 08:22 PM
Amazing that justice worked so swiftly over a hundred years ago. How do we restore that?
Posted by: Michael Ejercito | January 11, 2011 at 01:54 AM
If he planned ahead, he is not mentally ill.
Posted by: Michael Ejercito | January 11, 2011 at 01:54 AM
Don't Retreat!!! Reload!!!! There are more enemies of the the Tea Party out there.
Posted by: Dont Retreat, Reload!!!!! | January 11, 2011 at 04:36 PM
The enemy with in obama and THE WEAK-KNEED REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRAT,Wake up america!!!! OBAMA goes about his business by speaking the lie.“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed”Mmslim Barack Hussein Obama people have no idea of the extent to which they have to be gulled in order to be led." OBAMA will use every tool available: school teachers, politicians, news broadcasters, artists, musicians, scientists and doctors, lawyers and businessmen. All will be pressed into the service of OBAMA to deceive men. "All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those towards whom it is directed will understand it. Therefore, the intellectual level of the propaganda must be lower the larger the number of people who are to be influenced by it." truth be damned. Obama It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think. What good fortune for governments that the people do not think.truth be damned. . The commander The end of america , GOD HELP US ALL
Posted by: COMMANDER | January 12, 2011 at 04:02 PM
Here is my thing... I don't usually get into politics and debates but I along with so many others think that, "Insane or not, if you take a life it cost your life." Why does there need to be any debate on Insanity? It is a drain on the economy and for the working man. We all are upset already on what our taxes are usually spent on but for some of that to house ones who took a life? It just does not make sense on why we are the ones who literally pay for someone elses crime. Give them the injection, or death penalty and be done with it.
Posted by: Jeremy K. Crockett | January 30, 2011 at 12:40 AM