Goodbye, Gabby

It should have become apparent to anyone who realized just how badly wounded Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was in the January 2011 shooting in Tucson that she would eventually have to resign her seat. So it was no surprise when Giffords announced that would in fact quit the House of Representatives this week to concentrate on her ongoing recovery. She was able to put the announcement in her own words, literally - she made the announcement in a video release - so the woman who has been an inspiration to many has a very good chance of recovering fully. And she's vowed to remain active in politics regardless.

Alas, she won't be an inspiration to pass meaningful gun control legislation, which has a very good chance of getting defeated in Congress - if anyone has the gall to even bring it up. (Every time a horrendous shooting occurs in this country - which happens frequently enough to feel like an everyday occurrence - Chris Matthews asks the panelists on his Sunday broadcast show if gun control legislation has a chance of even getting considered, and his panelists respond with an imitation of Marcel Marceau in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie - "No!") This isn't so much a partisan condition as it is an American condition - a peculiarly and insufferably American love of firearms.

Am I suggesting that Americans are peculiar and insufferable? You can draw your own conclusion.

On the other hand . . .. Sarah Palin - one of the most peculiar and most insufferable Americans in recent memory - has seen her stature reduced a result of the Giffords shooting. In the 2010 midterm election campaign, Palin posted a map of Democratic House districts targeted by Republicans, depicting the districts with rifle crosshairs over them - one of them was Giffords' district. After the shooting, she gave such a mean-spirited defense of her actions in the wake of charges that she incited violence that her rising star dimmed quickly. So some taste survives here, enough to not only lessen Palin's visibility but to also eliminate the Minnesota Twins (Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann) from the Republican presidential nomination contest early.

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.