Tucson Massacre

I was afraid something like this would happen.

With all of the heated and toxic rhetoric against our leaders and representatives in Washington, it was only a matter of time before someone was hurt. In this case, it was Arizona Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Ms. Giffords had been the subject of angry and/or violent demonstrators before. Her district office had been vandalized after she voted for the health care law. Sarah Palin featured on her Web site a picture showing a rifle cross-hair symbol over her district that encouraged voters to take Giffords out in the 2010 midterm elections.

With the influence of talk radio, the presence of guns at presidential rallies, and a U.S. Senate candidate proposing "Second Amendment remedies" to big government, it was not a question of whether a U.S. Representative would be shot. It was a question of when.

I don't know the motive behind the suspected gunman, Jared Lee Loughner. There's nothing in his own rhetoric, much of it incoherent, to suggest a political or even a personal vendetta. But all indications are that he deliberately meant to assassinate Giffords (and killed a federal judge, John Roll, caught in the crossfire), and Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik is convinced that something in the heated political discourse in America might very well have provoked Loughner. He is not convinced, though, the Loughner acted alone.

It took Dupnik, an Arizonan, to say what others could not - that Arizona has become a "mecca" for bigotry and hatred, what with the backlash against Mexican immigrants and the hostility toward local politicians like Raul Grijalva, another Democratic congressman, and the questioning of Grijalva's very Americanism. In a state where a former Vice President's son has advocated "knocking the hell" out of Washington as a congressman, there was a powder keg waiting to explode. Today, it did.

Gabrielle Giffords has, as of this writing, come out of surgery and is expected to make a full recovery despite the severity of her wound, a bullet fired at point-blank range that entered her head and exited it at another point. Seventeen other people were wounded, the aforementioned federal judge, a nine-year girl, and four others fatally.

When Nancy Pelosi warned of such violence with great emotion in September 2009, many refused to take her warning seriously. Today, she expressed sorrow at the shooting of Ms. Giffords but didn't say that she'd told us something like this would happen. She was too classy to do so, and she didn't really need to.