by A. Jacobina Poulsen

Created on: January 17, 2011   Last Updated: January 19, 2011

Within a few short hours of the senseless shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others in Arizona, the Internet and the airwaves were saturated with theories on the shooter's motivation - his political affiliations and blame for this tragedy had been firmly placed - all before anyone knew so much as the shooter's name.  People who should know better, from law enforcement officials to journalists, painted a portrait of the killer based on nothing more than political bias and suppositions.  Despite the evidence that politics had little or nothing to do with the attack, the accusations continued. As more information became known over the course of the next few days, the narrative could not be maintained and the guilt for the massacre would be transferred from a few select people to the American public at large.  The public commentary was deemed toxic and vitriolic.  Free speech and exchange of ideas was now under indictment for the murder of 6 persons on one Saturday morning in Tuscon.

Regardless of the calls for "civility" and a "toning down of the rhetoric" that have been widely broadcast throughout the media, a brief review of the commentary in the week following the shooting indicates that the massacre of innocents at the Safeway that Saturday morning had no impact whatsoever on the public discourse.  In direct contradiction to all the facts that were coming to light about the nature of the gunman - that he was an anarchist, apolitical, that he didn't watch TV or listen to the news - the media still continued to discuss the effect they imagined political rhetoric to have had on this assassin.  Those who were initially named as bearing responsibility for the shooting came forth with accusations of their own, citing examples of violent rhetoric employed by those on the other side of the political spectrum.  Each side attacked and defended, as usual, with little effect on how Americans viewed this event or the political atmosphere.  

The American public, however, were not persuaded.  A poll taken by CBS within a few days of the events in Tuscon showed that a majority of Americans did not believe that political rhetoric was the cause for the attack on Giffords and the crowd that had gathered.  They did not believe that the exercise of free speech, however heated or fraught with what some might consider violent imagery, was sufficient to motivate the shooter to committing this atrocity.

Violent rhetoric and imagery

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