Jared Lee Loughner - the Face of Evil or Sarah Palin's Puppet?
The massacre perpetrated by Jared Lee Loughner in Arizona on January 8th, 2011, killing 6 and injuring 13 is a tragedy... a pure act of evil that seems to defy a logical explanation.
By all accounts Loughner was mentally disturbed. Or was he?
Not as tragic, but almost as disturbing, is the main stream media and liberal left's attempt to assign fault and link conservatives from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity, and others, to this cowardly act of violence. The left will always try to discredit and damage those they fear... even at the expense of belittling the life of a child.
The Six Killed:
Judge John Roll ,63;
Dorthy Murray, 76;
Dorwin Stoddard, 76;
Christina Greene, 9;
Phyllis Scheck, 79;
Gabriel Zimmerman, 30.
Poster Child for...
Perhaps, more than anything, Loughner is a reflection of where we are as a society. Perhaps he is the poster child of a subculture of drugs, violent video games, evil worship, and perceived entitlement. A growing population that lies just below the visible surface and ignored by most until something like the senseless murder of a Federal Judge, a child, and 4 others stirs things up for a while.
What is apparent is we no longer have a reliable media organization in this country. Most of the media has a huge left-leaning bias... and refuses to ask hard questions of, or investigate anyone on the left. They automatically assumed that Loughner listened to conservative talk radio and was somehow mind-controlled by Sarah Palin's "target" graphics and phrases like "reload". Jared was no more affected by this than by the color of socks President Obama wore that morning.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article about Jared's online gaming activities around one online game called Earth Empires. He'd played it since he was 13. My guess is that if he played this game, then he probably played more violent online, interactive games as well. Games you win by killing over and over, and where the graphics are so real it's disturbing.
So why didn't the media immediately jump on this and blame the video gaming industry and all the gratuitously violent video games? Because the truth does not help their liberal bias.
I don't know Jared Loughner. I don't know his past, or how he was raised. I don't know how he was treated as a child. But this I do know: most people would never do what he did. Even people with a somewhat challenging grip on reality would not do what he did.
Was his challenging grip on reality loose enough to be classified as mentally ill? My guess is no. Will he be found competent to stand trial? I hope so. His victims deserve no less.
I think Loughner falls into a group of people who are outcasts... who knows why, maybe his mother dressed him funny when he was little, or he had some other small problem and got picked on a lot, and he just didn't have the resources to deal with it.
Being an outcast is not a basis for insanely hideous behavior like he displayed on January 8th. However, combine that with years of drug use, violent video games, whatever evil he worshiped at the skull shrine in his back yard, and a sense of being screwed over by society: you then have the makings of a nitroglycerin laced personality.
Did Jared Fall Through the Cracks?
I hope that we learn something positive from this sad event. I hope that we do not rush to pass a plethora of new laws. We have enough laws. Laws can't protect us from tragedy. Nor can we build a society where no one ever falls through the cracks - it's just not feasible.
Did Jared fall through the cracks? Obviously he did. He was able to purchase a gun after being turned down by the Army for illegal drug use. Pretty big crack. I'll bet there were a lot of others too. The investigations into his life will probably show he should have been singled out years ago for his behavior and received help. Had he received help perhaps this horrible event would never have taken place.
It's not about guns. If Jared couldn't get a gun he would have drove a car through the crowd, or made a bomb, or found some other way... evil is smart, evil is persistent.
I know that Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, God, Jesus, or George W Bush did not cause this tragedy, but rather Jared Lee Loughner. He pulled the trigger.
Until next time,
Fred
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Posted by Fred (aka Recoil) on January 16, 2011
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