The Dilemma of Guns

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The topic of conversation for the last few days has been the school shooting in Florida this week.

I understand that the process of burying the victims begins today. It's a necessary ritual, but it is sure to fan the flames awhile longer.

It is important for everyone to understand that, in the aftermath of such an event, we all want to feel safer, but individual definitions of safer tend to vary widely. Emotions dominate the discussion. That is precisely the time when cooler heads need to prevail.

I'm going to say something now that is sure to be ridiculed and misunderstood, but I'm going to say it, anyway.

We need to have a rational and logical discussion about this.

Both extremes on the political spectrum go into kneejerk mode when something like this happens, and that gets in the way of having a meaningful conversation. The extremes actually represent a fairly small portion of the population, but their arguments are so shrill and their insistence upon being heard is so dedicated that they drown out everything else. Talk about sucking the oxygen out of the room.

I don't really have to describe their by–now quite predictable arguments, do I?

Deep down, I often suspect that both sides secretly love it when children account for most of the victims of a tragedy like this because it magnifies both causes. Both would deny that, but it is surely true. Dead children give the extreme left a chance to trot out its favorite position — America must outlaw military–grade weapons in civilian hands (psst: That's already been done).

And they give the right a chance to argue that everyone should be armed because a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun. Like many things, that looks good on paper but not so much in practice.

Both extremes are uncompromising, and that is simply undemocratic, but it is the inevitable outcome of our tribalistic, polarized culture. It is a clear indication of just how polarized we are that each side blames the other for this. The right blames Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. The left blames Ronald Reagan or the Bushes. The truth is that no one is blameless. This problem predates all of those presidencies. The buck has been passed for many decades.

This nation has faced many problems in the past, and it was through compromise that we found solutions. But sometime — and I am not sure when — it was apparently decided that compromise equals weakness. That is undemocratic.

No one is willing to compromise anymore. No one is willing to listen to the other side — or even to acknowledge that the other side might have a legitimate point or two to make.

We need to pull back from the extremes now and have this conversation from a more centrally located perspective. If we can do that, we will have taken the first crucial step to finding an answer instead of making the situation worse.

Learning From History

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The mass shooting at an historically black church in Charleston, S.C., last week is disturbing on so many levels. It is overwhelming from a distance. I can only imagine what it must be like closer to Ground Zero.

There is, above and beyond all else, the disturbing story of the event itself — a young man sat through an hour or so of Bible study with a group of (presumably) strangers, then (apparently) calmly opened fire on them. Nine people were killed.

In case you're wondering why I used the parentheses on a couple of words in the preceding paragraph, it is because there is still so much we do not know. As there usually is at this stage of the investigation into a criminal act. But TV has conditioned many people to believe that all loose ends can be tied up in an hour's time, allowing for commercials — so they leap to conclusions without knowing all the facts that can put an event into context.

Usually, those conclusions are self–serving rubbish.

The intention is not, as some people would have you believe, to justify what happened. The intention is to satisfy the legal requirements to define a criminal act accurately. Those definitions have evolved through many millennia and generations of human experience. When one person kills another, that is a tragedy, but the law must know certain things before a case can be dealt with appropriately.

There are a lot of emotions swirling around this case, and I sympathize with that, but the law should not be administered on emotion. It should be administered on facts. In a criminal case, especially one that involves the death of one or more people at the hands of another, facts establish the legal nature of the crime. Emotion, as we should have learned from recent events, is often mistaken and can cause another tragedy.

Do you recall the 1996 Atlanta Olympics? A bomb went off the night of July 27, 1996, at the Olympics, killing one person and injuring 111 more. A security guard discovered the bomb before it went off and managed to clear a lot of people from the area, probably preventing more injuries and deaths, but he still became the prime suspect in the case. The media was relentlessly aggressive in its pursuit of him, treating him as if it was a foregone conclusion that he was guilty — until he was cleared of all accusations a few months later. He had never been formally charged with anything, but the damage to his reputation had been done. His job was terminated on the basis of unreliable information provided to his employer.

Our experience has told us that a person is justified in killing another if the other person posed a threat to the first person's life. In other words, we have concluded that self–defense is a valid, albeit regrettable, reason to kill. So the law must answer the question, did this young man kill in self–defense? There has never been any indication whatsoever that he killed in self–defense so any legal provisions on that can be ignored.

And, because of our experience, we have decided that if someone causes another person's death through negligence, that, too, should be treated differently by the justice system than murder would be treated. The case in Charleston clearly did not result from negligence.

Our experience has told us that it is not right to hold someone responsible for his or her acts if he or she is insane. That is much more of a gray area, and it requires weeks and months of evaluation before that can be determined. It may also involve interrogating a suspect's doctor to find out if that suspect had any known mental issues and/or had been prescribed any medication to treat such a condition. At this point, it appears that the answer to both questions would be "yes" in this case.

The law also needs to know whether the killing was premeditated. If someone planned to kill another, that is — and should be — handled differently than a killing that occurs out of the blue (i.e., a couple of people get into an argument that turns into a fight with guns or knives or even fists and one of them is killed in the fight — tragic but usually not premeditated).

A premeditated killing can be punished by death. Unpremeditated convictions usually result in jail time.

If it was premeditated, the law needs to know if it was the result of a conspiracy. Did someone else participate, either at the scene or behind the scenes? That requires time, too — sometimes a lot of it. Certainly more than an hour. (Heck, I've heard suggestions all my life that the John F. Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, but, after more than 50 years, that remains a matter of opinion only.)

In this case, the evidence suggests it was premeditated and, to this point, does not suggest that there was a conspiracy, but the investigators need to be allowed time to talk to all relevant witnesses and review available evidence. I have heard of no second shooters, nor have I heard any suggestion that someone paid this young man to shoot these people. It appears he acted alone, but the law must be satisfied, and laws vary from state to state.

And that isn't all there is to it.

Until recently, I would have thought that most police killings are not premeditated. In most cases, the lack of premeditation would qualify a killing for a lesser charge, but the killing of a police officer is treated as a capital crime (and, therefore, eligible for the death penalty). It is our way of discouraging people from killing law enforcement officers (which, I suppose, includes judges and other court officers) under any circumstances.

As I say, the law evolves over time, and there are provisions in the law that make it legally possible to prosecute an unpremeditated killing as if it were premeditated — if someone is killed when another crime is taking place (i.e., a convenience store robbery), the person responsible for the killing is eligible for the death penalty even though the death of another person was not intended.

If you have ever served on a jury, you know that legal verdicts are seldom, if ever, as simple as "guilty" or "not guilty." The verdict forms consist of many pages of questions, most of which are designed to answer specific questions like the ones I have just outlined.

Why must so many questions be answered? Well, it has a lot to do with the experiences that the Founding Fathers had. They came from environments where it was customary for the state to take a person into custody and hold that person indefinitely without informing him or her of the reason. The Founding Fathers believed all people were entitled to due process — and that suspects deserved protection against being repeatedly arrested and charged for the same offenses until a jury finally convicted them. (They called that "double jeopardy.")

Many times, convictions are appealed, and appellate courts have been known to overturn convictions for entirely unanticipated reasons. That is why it is so critically important for prosecutors to have their ducks in a row when they go to court. The burden of proof is on them, not on the defense. If a verdict is overturned, it will be because of a mistake someone on the prosecution's team made.

I'm not a lawyer, but I have served on juries before, and I covered trials in my reporting days. Not having studied law, I don't know the history of law and justice, and I readily admit that I could be wrong on this, but my impression is that law and logic (which is a class everyone in Arts and Sciences was required to take when I was in college) must have evolved simultaneously. Jury verdict forms remind me so much of the logic questions I had to plot — If all A are B, and all B are C, then all A are C.

(For people who never had to take Logic, I suppose the most appropriate comparison would be your standard flow chart — "If the answer is yes, proceed. If the answer is no, stop.")

It seems to me that is what much of the application of the law comes down to — logic, the law of averages, probability. Comparing cases without context can become matters of comparing apples to oranges when it is really more instructive to compare apples to apples. The fact is, though, that each person and each case is different from all the others. People are individual and imperfect; they don't share the same brain or possess the same experiences.

So, it seems to me, as long as the application of law is made by imperfect people, there will be imperfections in the system. But that doesn't mean we stop trying to make the system better. We try to learn from the situations we face, especially the ones that challenge what we have always believed, just as we learn from history in all walks of life. Discoveries are important in the evolving story of humankind. One discovery begets another, and together they form the building blocks for yet another discovery. We could not have sent rockets to the moon if we had not, at some point along the way, discovered how to make and control fire.

History is also about learning from mistakes, errors in judgment, what we have tried to do about them in the past that was successful and what didn't work (so we don't keep spinning our wheels). Sometimes history is shameful, but no useful purpose is served by revising it. The only useful purpose is to remember, like the child who learns from experience not to put his hand on a hot stove. That child probably won't try to go through life without a stove, but he will learn when not to touch one. Do you recall what George Santayana wrote? "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Wise words.

My father was a religion professor at a small liberal arts college in Arkansas. One summer, when I was 13, my family spent a couple of months in Austria. We took side trips to places, and some of the places my father wanted to visit were important scenes from Germany's Nazi past — concentration camps, Hitler's retreat (Eagle's Nest) in the German Alps near the centuries–old, tiny town of Berchtesgaden. He wanted to take pictures of those places, pictures he could use in his college classes. He heard about them when they were in the news when he was a teenager; this was his opportunity to see them.

But he was disappointed. The German government, in its misguided attempt to erase Nazism from its national consciousness, allowed the concentration camps to fall into disrepair, and Eagle's Nest became a restaurant and beer garden (the irony of that is that, although Hitler occasionally drank in private, he never drank in public and actually gave up alcohol altogether in his last years). In fact, the first law enacted by the Allied Control Council after World War II ended abolished all Nazi symbols. Possession of Nazi flags has been forbidden in many countries since; the importation or display of them is particularly frowned upon in Germany.

What has been achieved by that in recent years? Well, neo–Nazism has been on the rise, and skepticism about the Holocaust abounds. Those who cannot remember the past ...

I am not a professional historian, but I have been studying history all my life, and one of the things I have learned from it is this: No possible good comes from denying the past. And that is why I reject the popular move to ban the Confederate flag. The Civil War was certainly a dark chapter in America's history, but there were important lessons to be learned from it. Banning the Confederate flag would prevent those lessons from being learned and, perhaps, like modern Germany, at some point give rise to a new Confederate movement among the American young.

Would I have a Confederate flag in my home? Absolutely not — nor would I have a Nazi flag in my home. But pretending they didn't exist or that they didn't witness some horrific things is to deny history. And I have learned that history always has the last word.

Recently, the Supreme Court upheld the decision of Texas, the state where I live, not to allow people to have Confederate flags on their license plates on the grounds that license plates are government property. I support that ruling.

But possession of the flag is not banned. It is still legal to have one; choosing to display it is a matter of free speech on an individual basis. Some people find that offensive, just as some people find the burning of the American flag to be offensive, but free speech is protected under the First Amendment. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry spoke in an interview yesterday about how the Confederate flag divides people. He is right about that, but we owe it to ourselves and future generations not to ban the symbols of hate but to learn from them.

History is not served when it is whitewashed.

Television's First Live Murder

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Fifty years ago, plans were being finalized in Washington for John F. Kennedy's funeral the next day.

Back in Texas, churches in Dallas were holding their usual Sunday services under most unusual circumstances. At Dallas' Northaven Methodist Church, Rev. Bill Holmes gave a sermon that is still talked about half a century later. Holmes told the congregation that Dallas could not avoid its own responsibility for the assassination even if only one man pulled the trigger.

As Holmes spoke, the suspect in Kennedy's assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, was gunned down while being transferred from police headquarters to Dallas County's jail. The TV networks provided live coverage so some folks who were watching their TVs instead of attending church to pray for the Kennedys saw Oswald get shot by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

"The killing occurred in the presence of 70 uniformed Dallas policemen," wrote historian William Manchester. "Because NBC was televising the transfer, it was also television's first live murder."

That shooting left a gaping wound in the American experience that probably will never heal.

Because Oswald's death meant some questions will remain unanswered — no matter what kind of evidence is uncovered. There were questions that only Oswald could have answered. Investigators might have been able to establish whether he spoke the truth or not. But without Oswald's testimony — like the forensic evidence that was lost when the limousine was cleaned of blood spatter and John Connally's suit was sent to the dry cleaners — the case will forever remain unresolved.

Nothing that has been uncovered in the last half–century has definitively established the guilt or innocence of anyone.

The killing of Oswald short–circuited the American judicial system. Admittedly, it doesn't always work, but it was the only hope to get Oswald's side of the story. Maybe he would have told the truth. Maybe he wouldn't. That is the kind of thing that juries must decide, and, most of the time, jurors simply have to hope that they have seen and heard enough evidence to reach the right conclusion.

That hope was snuffed out by Ruby, acting as judge, jury and executioner, 50 years ago today — but that is only if one accepts what he said at the time. Conspiracy theorists cite Ruby's organized crime connections and speculate he was sent to rub out Oswald to keep him from talking.

In the words of John Pope of the New Orleans Times–Picayune, Oswald's death "opened the floodgates to a tsunami of speculation about Kennedy's murder." Is it any wonder that JFK conspiracy theories have found a welcome audience from an America still seeking closure for what happened here 50 years ago?

Three previous American presidents had been killed by assassins. The American public managed to achieve closure with two of them when the accused assassins were arrested, charged and eventually convicted. The absence of an assassin to convict, to hold responsible leaves a wound that does not heal easily.

The first presidential assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was killed before he could be brought to trial, which was another supposed link between the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy (a list of such links has been making the rounds almost since the day Kennedy was killed, but many of the items on the list have been discredited). And, to a degree, I suppose, the assassination of Lincoln by a Southern sympathizer led to more than a decade of abuse, known to history as the Reconstruction era. Was that because there was no formal trial for Booth? I don't know.

No one disputed that Booth shot Lincoln. There was a theater full of witnesses who saw Booth leap from Lincoln's box after the shooting. I have heard of no credible witnesses who could identify Oswald as the man who fired at Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

"It would have been easier for the American people to accept any enemy, any conspiracy, any plot and then avenge John F. Kennedy," Theodore White wrote. "But what they had to face was an act of unreason, avenged by an individual act of obscenity."

That "act of obscenity" was witnessed by millions and captured on film. There was no doubt about who killed Oswald.

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But doubts about who killed John F. Kennedy have lingered now for half a century.

I believe they will linger forever.

Predictable Responses

Like most Americans, I have been watching a lot of interviews — and I have been reading a lot of articles — about the tragic movie theater shootings in Colorado.

And, as is usually the case following something like this, there is a predictable wave of responses coming from our polarized political parties. Neither one seems capable of coming up with anything new, but the old approaches don't work.

Most — but not all — Democrats seem to believe the answer is to clamp down on gun ownership. Gun control is their mantra.

If guns weren't so readily available, they argue, this wouldn't have happened.

Well, I don't know if it absolutely would have happened, anyway, but, yes, it positively could have, even if stricter gun regulations were enacted. From what I have heard and read, the suspect had no prior record other than a speeding ticket. Until he opened fire on that crowded movie theater audience, there was no legal reason to deny his request to purchase a gun.

And most — but not all — Republicans support enhanced gun rights. Many appear to favor some concealed weapons legislation that would permit people to carry guns almost anywhere.

If such a law was in place across the nation, they argue, fewer people would attempt something like the theater shooting for fear that someone in the crowd would be armed and would return fire.

I've heard it argued in the last couple of days that, if someone else in that theater had been armed, the casualty toll would have been much lower because someone would have shot the gunman.

Actually, nearly every state already has a shall–issue policy regarding permits to carry weapons. That means that, as long as the applicant meets the requirements of the jurisdiction (which, at least, usually means residency, minimum age and providing fingerprints), granting the permit is a routine matter.

There might be occasions when a concealed weapon really could prevent something far worse from happening.

But, try as I may, I can't imagine many people sitting in a dark theater being able to distinguish between the make–believe world they had been watching on the screen and the real world activity breaking out around them.

Even if they had a concealed weapons permit, and even if they had the weapon with them — how likely is it that they could put two and two together in a matter of seconds, adjust their vision in the dark theater and shoot the gunman without also shooting innocent bystanders in what must have been a scene of utter chaos?

OK, some might concede that the darkness of the theater would be an impediment. But how about other settings, in broad daylight?

Well, I do know of a time right here in Texas when a man went on a shooting rampage in a cafeteria during the noon hour. A woman was eating lunch there with her elderly parents, both of whom were shot and killed by the gunman.

The woman later lamented that, although she had a permit to carry a gun, she didn't have it with her. It was in the glove box of her car.

She kept insisting that she would have returned fire to prevent her parents' deaths if she had had the weapon with her. But I have my doubts.

I'm sure the woman was sincere, but, in the heat of the moment, who would have that presence of mind? There were dozens of people in that cafeteria, some of whom probably had permits to carry weapons — and may have had the weapons with them — but no one returned the gunman's fire until police marksmen arrived on the scene.

Concealed weapons permits have been around for quite awhile — I believe Illinois is the only state that does not issue them — and I could be wrong about this, but I don't recall a single instance in which a gunman was brought down by a would–be victim who was carrying a concealed gun.

That is an idealized scenario.

When you're talking about real people in real situations, though, I'm inclined to think that most people would be in shock. They might dive for cover, they might run in the opposite direction, but that's flight winning the internal fight or flight debate that man has been having for centuries.

Most of us probably would like to believe that fight would win, that, when push comes to shove, we'd be prepared to stand up to evil, even at the risk of our own lives, but I don't believe even those with weapons permits would think about their weapons — unless they have law enforcement or military backgrounds.

So what can be done about the violence that continues to infect our culture after so many well–meaning but apparently futile efforts to control it?

I honestly don't know what the answer is.

That's the kind of thing we pay our elected officials to decide.

The Tragedy in Colorado

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It is still Friday, July 20, 2012.

The smoke (please excuse the pun) is still clearing in Colorado following the shooting at the midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

In the coming days, I am sure, more will be known about the gunman, what led him to his heinous act and the eventual death toll than is known now. Please keep that in mind as you read this because, if you are reading this sometime in the future, some of the facts are sure to have changed.

There are bound to be things that are thought to be true as I write that will be proven to be false. Already today, the death toll has fluctuated downward, but it may well go upward in the coming days. There are still people fighting for their lives, and some may lose that fight. The police are trying to figure out how to get into the shooting suspect's apartment and disarm booby trap[s] the suspect left behind, and I've heard some people say that process could take days or weeks.

But something that will not change is the fact that, once again, the relative peace of daily life for most Americans was shattered.

This morning, after I had first heard of the shootings, I went on Facebook, where I found that one of my former journalism students — now the executive editor of his hometown newspaper — had shared his paper's Associated Press account of what had happened in those early morning hours when most of us were sleeping in blissful ignorance.

And, in the comments section that accompanies just about every article that is published online these days, a young person identified as a student at the local high school, commented, "I don't understand why the world has to be like this sometimes."

And I was reminded of when that editor and I were on a college campus together two decades ago, and one of his classmates asked me, after observing the number of religious leaders who had taken exception to various accounts of Bill Clinton's ethics and aligned themselves with the likes of Patrick Buchanan, who had delivered a speech that was extremely long on intolerance at that summer's Republican convention, about the logic behind their position.

"I thought ministers were supposed to be about love and forgiveness," he said to me.

The same thought that crossed my mind on that occasion crossed my mind this morning when I read that young man's comment — the naivete of youth.

I guess we all start out that way. It reminds me of a conversation Daphne had with her father on the TV show Frasier. Her father told her that he was splitting up with Daphne's mother for good, and Daphne, disillusioned and disappointed, said she had always believed that love conquered all.

"We all believe that when we're young," her father replied, "but then life beats us around a bit, and you learn to dream a little smaller."

There may be a lot of truth in that statement, but July 20 has always struck me as a date when the stakes have been even greater than usual — and, consequently, the hopes have been a bit grander, too.

July 20 often seems to bring memorable events. When I was a child, men walked on the moon for the first time on a July 20. When my parents were still young, a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler failed on this date — an event that wasn't nearly as positive as but, in some ways, was more significant than the moon walk.

(Hitler would be dead within a year, anyway, but, if he had been killed on this date in 1944, it is probable that many lives would have been spared. How many? No one can say.)

When my grandparents were children, the Ford Motor Company shipped its first car on this date. Henry Ford's assembly line concept radically transformed the 20th century.

There are other dates like that on the calendar, dates when great strides were made in medicine, manufacturing, agriculture, whatever.

But sprinkled among them — and sometimes, as is the case today, coinciding with them — are days of unspeakable and unexpected terror and anguish.

Such occasions do not always feature a lone gunman. Sometimes it is other things.

But no generation is immune to shocking reminders that life is not fair.

It hasn't been fair when young people have died in what should be one of the safest settings outside their homes — their schools.

It wasn't fair that a crew of astronauts that included the woman who was slated to be the first teacher in space died in a fiery explosion less than two minutes after liftoff.

Nor was life fair when prominent people were being gunned down and race riots were breaking out in the 1960s.

I have often pondered why it is that some people die so young and others live into their 80s or 90s. There must be more to it than the cliche "the good die young."

The more religious among us will tell you that it is all part of God's plan and that we are not intended to understand God's reasoning.

That's just as well, I suppose, because I used to get headaches trying to figure out God's reason for allowing babies to perish in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The only reason I can think of is sheer randomness. I'm sure there were people at that movie who were there only at the request of others; maybe some of those people were hurt or killed — perhaps only because they were being polite to someone else.

I've heard of unaccounted–for servicemen who were undoubtedly prepared for the possibility of dying in a foreign land but more than likely never gave it a thought while standing in line at a movie theater.

The fact that this kind of thing has the power to paralyze virtually the entire country with fear tells you how rare — comparatively — such a thing really is here.

This summer, I've been re–reading Truman Capote's brilliant nonfiction novel "In Cold Blood" about the massacre of a Kansas farm family in 1959. "[D]rama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there," Capote wrote.

(Aurora, Colo., is considerably larger than Holcomb, Kan., was in 1959, but I suspect that the same thing could be said of Aurora.)

At one point, Capote observed that visitors to Holcomb noticed that almost all the lights in town were on late into the evening.

Capote asked, "Of what were they frightened?" and supplied the answer he had received over and over: "It might happen again."

That is an irrational fear, of course, but it's one that some people do have in these situations. I saw an online poll this morning asking people if they were more or less likely to patronize a movie theater this weekend. Thousands of people responded that they were less likely.

People living in Israel have long been accustomed to the idea that the store where they were shopping or the restaurant in which they were eating or even the road upon which they were traveling could erupt in violence at any minute.

When that happens, they mourn their dead, too, but they move on much faster than we do.

Here in America, I expect our national conversation to focus on Aurora for weeks — in spite of the Olympics and, perhaps, in spite of the conventions.

That will be a good thing if it leads to constructive conversations about what can be done to minimize the risk of such a thing happening again without trampling on constitutional rights.

But already today I have heard people, on both sides of the divide, arguing that the gunman had a political agenda.

Such talk can have no purpose except to contribute to what is already shaping up to be the dirtiest presidential campaign in my memory.

And that we do not need.

What we need is a discussion about how to reduce the possibility of violence intruding on our daily lives.

It probably cannot be eliminated.

But maybe it can be curtailed.

Photographs and Anxieties

I seldom hear much about Gabrielle Giffords these days.

That is how it should be, I guess.

After all, she was news on the day she was shot — and in the days that followed, when her dramatic fight for life was played out on the nation's TV screens in the form of medical briefings.

But, for most of the last five months, she has been just another patient and the details of her treatment have remained out of public view. She did survive a wound that was worse than many that hospital personnel usually see, but most of the milestones in her recovery have been observed in private.

Lately, though, Giffords has been back in the spotlight — sort of. She has remained in the shadows, but she was on hand when her husband's space shuttle mission began, and then she was in the news again after undergoing major surgery to repair her skull.

Her doctor says she is coming along splendidly and has taken to calling her "Gorgeous Gaby."

Giffords will probably recede from public view now and resume the arduous task of recovering from her injuries — which is fine with me ...

... except for the fact that her mere presence at the shuttle launch, the reports of her milestone surgery and now the posting of the first photos of Giffords since the shooting have revived thoughts that I couldn't avoid in January but nevertheless managed to tuck away for the last few months.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since January, but try to recall the atmosphere if you can.

The immediate reaction of Democrats was that the shooting had been perpetrated by a right–wing extremist and that it was the inevitable outcome of the incendiary political environment.

A lot of the blame was directed at the so–called Tea Party and Sarah Palin — even though all evidence suggested that the gunman was not motivated by politics and had no links to either.

Democrats were reluctant to acknowledge that, which I believe reveals the true source for the Democrats' behavior. Fear of a — for the most part — faceless them.

It's political paranoia that is worthy of Richard Nixon.

I sensed a lot of fear among Democrats when Republicans captured both houses of Congress in 1994. Democrats had held at least one chamber of Congress every year for 40 years, and many were fearful that they had lost their grip on legislative power forever.

That hasn't happened, of course. President Clinton was re–elected in 1996, and a Democrat was elected president in 2008. In between, Democrats recaptured Congress and expanded their majorities before losing the House last year.

But that 1994 experience is fresh enough in their memories that many Democrats are fearful of losing whatever they have and will do whatever they believe must be done — including sacrifice some of their commitments — to keep it.

Some saw what they interpreted as unmistakable signs of erosion in their base when Republicans took control of the House in 2010's midterm elections, and they are fearful that the second shoe will drop in 2012 when Democrats could well become victims of their own success as they defend two–thirds of the Senate seats that will be on the ballot.

That is only one fear, though.

Another fear, I believe, was to be found in the response to the attack on Giffords.

Since the 1960s, Democrats have been conditioned to believe that someone or a group or a conspiracy of some sort has been resisting their leaders and their causes. They saw three of their prominent leaders assassinated in the 1960s, then they saw Democratic presidents smeared (one successfully, one unsuccessfully) in the 1970s and 1990s.

And they have been fearful that something like that could happen again.

With this president — the first black president — there was always an unspoken concern in every conversation in which I participated — even before he was elected — that, at some point, somebody would take a shot at him.

I believe that is, in large part, why Democrats have been so quick to accuse people who disagree with Obama of being racists. It's kind of a proactive measure, understandable in a way — but it is still offensive to millions of Americans who honestly disagree with the president on policy and could care less what color his skin happens to be.

Fortunately, no one has taken a shot at Obama yet — and, hopefully, no one will.

Presidential security has improved a lot since the last time someone shot a president, even more since someone was successful in killing a president. But it still could happen. It has happened four times in our history. If the methodology for protecting a president is better now than it was, so too is the technology that can be used to attack a president.

Most presidents have accepted the fact that they could easily be killed if someone is, as Lincoln put it, willing to trade his life for the president's. If someone is that determined, it seems unlikely that anything can stop him.

I don't know if the first black president will be assassinated — or re–elected. I was not born with the ability to see the future.

I do know that the only trait that all great leaders share is confidence. They practically exude confidence — in America, in themselves and in the people. Without that, others won't follow — or, at least, they won't follow for long.

When a president takes the oath of office, no one truly knows what the fate of his presidency will be. Fifty years ago, no one knew that John F. Kennedy would die in a Dallas motorcade before the voters could give his presidency a thumb's up or a thumb's down. One hundred and fifty years ago, no one knew that Abraham Lincoln would preside over a bloody civil war — and be killed a few days after its conclusion.

And 30 years ago, no one knew that the oldest man ever elected president would survive not one but two terms in office — as well as an assassination attempt.

History is full of contradictions, full of twists and turns. A president must be confident and steadfast, sure that the course he is following is correct; the people always seem to sense uncertainty and hesitance.

I'm glad Giffords is recovering so well.

And I would urge the president and those who are embarking on campaigns to replace him to avoid incendiary arguments.

The nation was not served by the introduction of unwarranted charges and counter–charges about patriotism in 2004, and it will not be served by the introduction of unwarranted charges and counter–charges about racial attitudes in 2012.

Let's talk about the issues and the nation's problems in 2012.

No matter what else happens.

Mourning in America

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"We leave people alone in America, to a fault. We walk past rambling, dazed homeless people every day, if we live in big cities, avoiding their gaze rather than seeking to intervene. And even when we try to stop people whose behavior seems to pose a danger to themselves or others, it's hard to do anything about it, as Loughner's professors at Pima Community College discovered.

"Look at the moon–faced grin of the alleged shooter as he appeared in court for arraignment Monday. It's a haunting photo, not least because we have seen faces like that before — people who are severely disturbed but on the streets in this era of 'de–institutionalization.' "

David Ignatius
Washington Post

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Bob Greene of CNN asks an intriguing question.

It isn't a question for which there is an easy or even semi–satisfying answer. However, if you watched the memorial service in Arizona last night, it is unavoidable.

Technically speaking, I suppose, Greene asked two questions. Frankly, though, they asked the same thing, just expressed it in different ways.

"Why does it always seem to take something like this to move us, however briefly, toward civility and mutual understanding?" Greene asked. "Why is it usually in the worst of times that we step back, lower our voices and look for our common humanity?"

Why does it always seem to take a tragedy — in Tucson, in Oklahoma City, in Kent, Ohio — to bring Americans together?

(Speaking of Kent, it is ironic that a man who survived the shooting on the Kent campus 40 years ago was in Tucson Saturday.)

I will always remember the days immediately following the September 11 attacks. Airplanes had been grounded so there was no activity in the skies. Here on earth, I noticed appreciably more civility between people. I saw more simple acts of courtesy than I had ever seen before.

Here in Dallas, where, ordinarily, someone will cut you off on the road as soon as look at you (and, in most cases, probably wouldn't think twice about it if you wound up in a ditch or a collision because of their recklessness), drivers looked out for one another. They were more patient with each other.

I saw people holding doors for one another. I saw people drop things and apparent strangers picked them up and returned them to their rightful owners.

Matter of fact, I don't think I heard another car horn for two or three days after the terrorist attacks. I haven't seen any statistics so I could be all wrong, but I'd be willing to wager that car accidents were way down in those two or three days. People actually seemed to be looking out for each other.

But the shock wore off and, before long, we were back to doing the things we normally do.

It's our default position, I suppose. It isn't uniquely American, perhaps, just more noticeable here because everything we do (at least in theory) is out in the open.

Maybe it's because of the way this nation began. We are angry and suspicious, fiercely protective of our rights against the things (both real and perceived) that we believe threaten their existence.

Americans have always held strong views about things. Sometimes those views have come into conflict, and when something terrible like the shootings in Tucson occur, we assume the worst, that the enemies of democracy (our personal vision of it, anyway) are at work.

The really odd part about it, I think, is that the shooter, Jared Loughner, really doesn't seem to have had a political agenda. The community college he once attended has described him as " 'creepy,' 'very hostile,' 'suspicious,' an individual with a 'dark personality.' "

I have not heard anyone at the community college speak of his political views. No one seems to have noticed what they were.

Maybe that's part of the problem. No one noticed.

David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post, wonders "why nobody stopped this often incoherent, irrational young man on his long path to the rampage in Tucson."

It isn't as easy as it may sound. Ignatius observes that "even when we try to stop people whose behavior seems to pose a danger to themselves or others, it's hard to do anything about it, as Loughner's professors at Pima Community College discovered."

And Ignatius makes a valid point about the current discussion of the civility of our political discourse.

"That's good," he writes, "but we should expand the definition of 'civil.' A civil society isn't just about less screaming on cable TV. It also has an ethic of community, so that people try, as best they can, to look out for one another.

"There's a coarsening, uncivil effect when we watch homeless people ranting and mumbling, freezing in the cold — and cross the street, assuming that it's somebody else's business. It takes something out of us, individually and as a country."

I've heard a lot of talk in my life about "united we stand." But, until our society decides that mental health issues deserve as much attention as we have been giving to other health issues in the last couple of years, I fear we are destined for more of these moments.

More mourning in America.

The Mourner in Chief

With Barack Obama, what you see isn't always what you get.

That's the thought that went through my mind as the president neared the end of his speech at tonight's memorial service for the victims of the Arizona shooting on Saturday.

His performance reinforced the impression I have long had of him. This guy knows how to give a speech. Sometimes I think that's the kind of thing someone is born with. You can't teach it.

You can trust me on that, by the way. I took public speaking courses when I was younger, but, despite my best efforts, I don't think public speaking was ever my calling.

That wasn't my instructor's fault. I think there is only so much a public speaking instructor can do, anyway, no matter how gifted that person might be. It's like hiring Stan Musial, with his unorthodox swing, to coach hitting.

When he was on the campaign trail, Obama excelled at soaring rhetoric. It was what drew so many people to his side in the first place. It is what keeps so many in his corner today.

But many who voted for Obama with the expectation of seeing an aggressive, decisive leader in the White House have been disappointed by the tentative, at times timid approach Obama has taken to governing.

Perhaps it takes this kind of event to restore that Obama charisma, and it seems to have done that, at least temporarily. His speech tonight at the memorial service was a reminder of the kind of oratory of which this president is capable.

In an odd sort of disconnect, his presidential addresses have been low on inspiration and high on lecturing and scolding, but that wasn't appropriate to this occasion.

This is the kind of thing presidents are expected to do — and to do well.

It is what is being called the role of "mourner–in–chief." It is when circumstances force a president to comfort a bereaved nation. He cannot scold. He cannot lecture.

It is not a pleasant task. It wasn't pleasant for Bill Clinton when he had to travel to Oklahoma City in 1995. Nor was it pleasant for Ronald Reagan 25 years ago when he spoke to the nation on television following the Challenger disaster.

But it is a task that occasionally must be performed. Presidents who fall short of the mark — or, worse, do not make the attempt at all — usually do not remain president for long. On the other hand, presidents who are perceived to do well on this stage do tend to be re–elected.

Both Clinton and Reagan were re–elected, of course. Clinton's speech at Oklahoma City may have helped. Reagan's clearly did not since it came after he had already won a second term (although that could be said to have reinforced a generally positive national image of Reagan that originated when he was shot and grew as a result of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut).

Both speeches were so well done that AmericanRhetoric.com lists them among the top 100 speeches of the 20th century.

(Some people mention George W. Bush's speech to the nation after 9–11. But, in addition to the fact that it more properly belongs in the still nascent 21st century, my memory is that his performance the night of the attacks was less than inspiring. His speech before a joint session of Congress a week later, however, was better.)

In that respect, Barack Obama's trip to Arizona today was really his opportunity to show people he could empathize with them, "feel their pain," as President Clinton used to say.

And there is plenty of pain in southeast Arizona — as well as the rest of the nation. There is the physical and emotional pain brought on by the shootings themselves. And there is the less–easily defined pain of the divisiveness that many say was behind the shootings, even though I still have yet to see a direct link.

I'll grant you that Sarah Palin's choice of words in her efforts to deflect criticism was, to say the least, poor. "Blood libel" is as offensive to Jews as "crusade" — the term Dubya used in the aftermath of 9–11 — was to Muslims.

But right now, that only means she was guilty of poor judgment — she's been a frequent offender, and it has inspired a lot of anger against her.

There is certainly a lot of anger in American politics today, a lot of finger pointing. Conservatives feel they have been unfairly (pardon the pun) targeted. It is a self–defense mechanism, I think. They are correct when they point out that, from everything we know about the attacker, he could hardly be said to be a political conservative.

(In fact, I stand by what I wrote Monday, when I said the attacker appeared to be apolitical.)

And liberals believe the attack was the inevitable result of the venomous atmosphere in which we live. You can try to tell them that they're jumping to a fallacious conclusion by blaming Palin, which they are, and they will only counter with the argument that she has contributed more than anyone else to the venomous level of the political dialogue.

And that is hard to argue with as well.

It hasn't always been this way. In fact, it hasn't always been this way in my lifetime. When I was growing up, Republicans and Democrats could disagree without the other side questioning either their motivations or their ancestry. Everything wasn't sharply divided along party lines, and each side did not spend all its time, once it gained a majority, trying to undo what the other party had done while it held the majority.

It was possible in those days for people to vote against their party on issues and not be denigrated as a Democrat or Republican "in name only."

As long as both parties insist on playing that game, in which the #1 item on each side's agenda is to dismantle whatever the other side has done, nothing will be accomplished — at least not permanently.

That, in my mind, was the great challenge facing Obama when he came to Arizona today. He had to try to bring those two sides as close together as possible — and, to be fair, there wasn't much that anyone could do in a single speech.

But a president is a leader. He is not one of 100 senators or one of more than 400 representatives. His constituency is all 50 states, even the ones that voted against him, and more than 300 million citizens, and he must help their elected officials find common ground. He must set the tone, and there were hopes, even from those of us who did not vote for Obama two years ago, that his gift for oratory might begin the process of bringing the two sides closer together.

Do you think he succeeded?

No Easy Answers

It is only natural, I guess, that a lot of people — whether they are qualified to do so — are trying to pinpoint a reason for Saturday's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a judge and more than a dozen other people in Tucson, Ariz.

Because the congresswoman is a Democrat — and because her assailant apparently holds some extremist views — it is being assumed by many on the left that this is the inevitable product of the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

Jonathan Martin writes in Politico that the Tucson tragedy is a turning point for Palin. Whether she truly bears any responsibility for what happened, I think it should be the sort of event that makes us all stop and think about the things we say and do overtly — or covertly in the online world where anonymity is often assumed but rarely a reality.

I have no doubt that Palin and the Tea Party have contributed a lot to the atmosphere of intolerance. But those on the left should not be smug. Their responses to this event come across as knee–jerk to me — and likely to make things worse.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times, for example, wrote on his blog that Giffords, a centrist, was targeted because she is "a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona" in November's midterms.

Then, in case you missed the point, he was more direct in Sunday's column: "Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from?" he asked. "[I]t's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be 'armed and dangerous' without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P."

Actress Jane Fonda leaped into the fray with an ill–advised tweet that, among other things, misidentified Giffords as a progressive (as I said, she is a centrist) and pointed the finger at Palin.

I disagree with Palin on most issues. In all honesty, I try not to listen to her any more than I have to — but, to be fair, I don't recall her issuing a fatwa that called for the execution of Democratic office–holders.

That's the kind of news that would have been hard to avoid — particularly since, in the interest of candor, I must admit that many in the broadcast media (and, sadly, it is broadcasting from which most people do get their news and information) have already shown their bias against her.

I didn't even detect a coded message to that effect from Palin. I mean, I suppose one could apply any sort of definition one wishes to anything that Palin — or anyone else, for that matter — says in public.

But if Palin said anything that could be even loosely interpreted that way, it went straight over my head — and I like to think I'm a reasonably sharp person.

Anyway, my impression, from what I have seen and heard in the last 48 hours, is that the gunman, Jared Loughner (and, by the way, I looked at his Facebook page briefly before someone took it down), is a nut job. There must be a more technical term for it, but I don't know what it is.

His views often seem contradictory, even apolitical. In some ways, I guess, he could be said to be something of a centrist himself, neither right nor left, really, although, as I said, he does hold some extremist views, but there is no consistency. Some are extreme right, some are extreme left.

And he does appear to loathe Giffords. Perhaps the reason for that can be determined at some point.

My experience is that the reasons for these acts are seldom obvious. Thirty years ago, for example, a man shot Ronald Reagan and several others outside a Washington hotel. His reason for doing so? He was infatuated with a movie actress.

Nearly 40 years ago, a man shot George Wallace and several others in a parking lot. The man was motivated by a desire for fame, not by politics, even though Wallace was a notorious segregationist.

The assassinations of the 1960s were shrouded in mystery. Even if they were the acts of lone gunmen, enough questions remain unanswered for them to continue to be the focus of conspiracy theories.

But even if those assassinations were the results of conspiracies, the "lone nut" notion was made plausible by the presence of an actual, verifiable loner who could have been responsible, even if he really wasn't.

If one can presume that the things Loughner wrote about himself in his online postings were true, both sides can find ample evidence for blaming the other side, from the books he claimed to be his favorites to the statements he posted that gave glimpses into a sick and troubled mind.

If there is one thing I have learned from observing these episodes in my life, it is that you can seldom, if ever, identify these people ahead of time. The Arizona Republic, for instance, reports that Loughner was rejected for military service and kicked out of community college.

The military won't discuss the reasons for his rejection, citing the Privacy Act. The Republic mentions "multiple run–ins" with the police at the community college and hints at bizarre behavior.

He "was described by friends and former classmates as a loner," writes Robert Anglen for the Republic, "prone to dressing in black regalia of boots, trench coat and baggy pants even on the hottest days."

I have been hearing about "lone nuts" all my life. Many (not all) have, in fact, appeared to be crazy and to have acted alone. That hasn't prevented conspiracy theories from popping up.

Some have been more credible than others, but the one that emerged within hours of Giffords' shooting, of an older man who was mentioned as a person of interest, turned out to be the cab driver who drove Loughner to the store where the shootings took place.

Apparently, he followed Loughner into the store because he hadn't paid his fare.

There have always been eccentrics among us, but it has only been with the benefit of hindsight that we have been able to distinguish between eccentric behavior and threatening behavior.

I suspect that the people who look for someone to blame have deluded themselves. They believe there are simple answers to complex questions. And there is nothing more complex, more mystifying than the workings and the dysfunctions of the human brain.

It will be awhile before we have any answers about how much damage was inflicted on Giffords. It may also be awhile before we have any answers about why Loughner did this.

I suspect it will take much longer before our society figures out what to do about all this.

There are no easy answers.

Words Fail Me

I guess it is the kind of thing that you never get used to — and maybe it's a healthy sign that I am not.

I mean, I really would have expected someone like myself, someone who grew up with this kind of thing happening a lot more frequently in this country than it does today, to be better prepared for it than I was.

Even so, I was shocked when I heard today that Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, the target of an apparently crazed gunman in Tucson, Ariz. It literally left me at a loss for words, and even now I am trying to sort out how I feel, what I think.

Thankfully, it appears she will survive this attack, although I suppose only her doctors are currently in any kind of position to anticipate how complete her recovery will be or how long it may take. At this point, I suppose, they probably can't be too sure of much at all.

And I don't really want to speculate on any of that, either. For that matter, I don't really want to speculate on the gunman's motives or his political leanings.

There are plenty of people who are preoccupied with that tonight.

I think that may be part of the problem. Our society is far more interested in pointing fingers, in assigning blame than in correcting the problems those errors have produced.

The fact is that we are all to blame, no matter which side of the political spectrum we may occupy.

We are all guilty because the "toxic political environment" mentioned by the New York Times has been nurtured by both the left and the right. It does not exist only in Arizona nor does it exist solely in the South or the West or any other region of the country. The fact that a Democrat was the target today is no guarantee that a Republican will not be the target tomorrow.

Both sides have been guilty of irresponsibly fanning the flames of political passions, and now those passions are burning out of control.

This is when we need real leaders to step forward and bring the two sides together, to find common ground.