The Damage Done

The blame game sparked by the murderous shooting spree on the part of Jared Lee Loughner is starting to fade at the same time that confirmed information about Loughner reaches the mainstream media.

Even more interesting to me, some of this confirmed information appears on the front page of print editions as shown in the following excerpt from the Thursday, January 13, 2011 edition of the Washington Post:

Friends, teachers tell of Loughner's descent into world of fantasy

He played late-night marathon games of Monopoly with his buddies. He went with friends on family vacations. He would hang with pals at IHOP on Fridays. He had a girlfriend. He laughed and he loved and he knew things - about jazz, cars, fantasy games.

And then Jared Loughner slipped into a world of fantasy that was no online game. Slowly but steadily, his intelligence warped into a distorted, disconnected series of obsessions. He developed an illogical fascination with logic. Math, grammar, logic - the systems civilization has developed to make sense of the world became the means through which he expressed the confusion and pain in his increasingly lost mind.

The first sketches of suspects in horrific killings are usually scattered images of hate - an almost superhuman anger trained at others. But as the portraits gain detail, they generally reveal some toxic combination of frustration, abuse, illness and loss. Loughner, those around him say, had the whole package.

A picture of Loughner gleaned from interviews with more than two dozen friends, classmates, teachers and neighbors, as well as from his own writing in online forums, shows no evidence that politics or government were among his defining or enduring obsessions.

Read the entire article HERE.

Many readers of print media do not bother to turn the page to read articles which continue deeper in a newspaper and draw their conclusions based on front-page information. Therefore, we can conclude that the Left's blame game is losing traction in the news media — some five days after the shootings in Tucson.

In my experience, most people reached their conclusions about the cause or causes of the Tucson shootings early on — when the blame game was running in high gear and without enough factual information upon which to base a valid conclusion. In the days immediately following the shootings, print and broadcast media disseminated baseless opinions and called for action before the facts about Lougher were available.

Furthermore, now that Obama has spoken at length on the topic, stories about the Tucson shootings will fade from discussion even as the political and social consequences continue. The inevitability of those consequences was sealed in the first few days following the shootings. And those people not directly affected by acts of violence do have short attention spans, after all.

When someone becomes physically ill, we know how to proceed: research the symptoms, use over-the-counter remedies, eat chicken soup, consult a doctor, call 911, and so forth.

But do we know how to proceed when someone shows clear and undeniable signs of the kind of mental illness that Loughner evidenced? And if we do know how to proceed, can we legally proceed to seek help for a loved one or a friend? It seems to me that those are the questions for which we should now be seeking answers with careful deliberation.