Don't let victims be talking points

(Originally published in The Peak on January 17, 2011)

On January 8, U.S. democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at a public gathering in Tucson, Arizona. Her attacker then turned on the rest of the crowd, shooting haphazardly until he ran out of ammunition. Although Giffords herself miraculously survived, a state judge and a nine-year-old girl were among the six others slain.

The logical reaction would be to assume that Sarah Palin was behind this, right? Not directly, maybe, but through what was described as her “violent political rhetoric”.

Of course the shooter was a right-wing hillbilly; of course he was inspired by Sarah Palin and the far-right Tea Party movement. Hours after the news broke, before anything was known about the identity of the gunman, it was claimed that Palin’s website had an image of Giffords with a cross-hair superimposed.

A Vancouver blogger summed it up on Twitter: “the dangers a large uneducated population of armed rednecks & a right wing [Palin], [Beck], [Limbaugh] hate machine urging them on . . .” Comments like this betray a misguided, reflexive spite that seeks to demonize before it seeks to answer.

The killer, as it turns out, is neither a radical Christian nor a right wing ideologue. His politics appear to be those of a paranoid lunatic, more concerned with the government’s secret mind control agenda than partial birth abortions. He was paradoxically a fan of both Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In fact, he was described by peers as “far left”.

The reaction of the press to this tragedy stands in stark contrast to the rational reaction to the Fort Hood shootings in November of 2009. In that case, which appeared to be a clear-cut case of Islamic extremism which resulted in 13 deaths, CNN repeatedly warned against “jumping to conclusions.” With all of the PR implications around such an event, it’s reasonable to be cautious about such matters. Get the facts right, and make sure to keep the speculation to a minimum.

But there was a very different attitude towards the Giffords shooting, where CNN’s Wolf Blitzer first pointed out that there was no evidence linking Palin to the shooter, and then continued to engage in discussion which speculated about ways in which there might be a connection, anyway. Ironically, the discussion has since spun into the power of rhetoric and the responsibility that politicians have for what they say and how they say it, the finger being not so subtly pointed at Palin and the GOP.

Whether this is true or not is irrelevant; this isn’t a message to be preached using the coffins of the victims as a makeshift soapbox.