Friday, January 21, 2011

It's curious that the Tucson shooting is being described as an assassination. If that's what it was - if Jared Loughner had meant to kill Gabrielle Giffords - why did he shoot all those other people? His lunacy is to blame, obviously, you might say. But John Hinkley was crazy, too. (Consider how far backward we've gone in the time between Hinkley and his handgun and Loughner and his semiautomatic - what an insult to Brady and the effort that bore his name, what a joke!) I get a sense that everyone else was shot just because Loughner could shoot them. That was the elemental calculation in his unsound mind. And why could he shoot them? Because he had the right gun, and the right amount of bullets. It may sound reasonable to say, "Guns don't kill people, people do," but here's what an insane person thinks when they've committed to killing someone: "This gun wants to kill people. And I'm going to let it."