Randall Amster: First Amendment Remedies: Hey Sarah, Refudiate This

George Packer: No Equivalency; David Frum: Talk May Not Have Caused This, But This Should Cause Talk
George Packer in the New Yorker makes a clear-cut case about the difference between the Rhetoric of the left and the right, regardless of whether such Rhetoric has anything to do with the actions of Jared Lee Loughner. (h/t Taegan Goddard) In fact, there is no balance — none whatsoever. Only one side has made the Rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its Grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment...

Detroit Free Press, Detroit News blame 2nd amendment for Arizona shooting
Deranged lunatics hell-bent on killing people will always be able to procure a weapon no matter the Gun Laws. All gun restrictions do is take weapons away from law-abiding citizens. When seconds count to save your life, the police are only minutes away. The liberal MSM just don't get the simple fact that the Founding Fathers wanted us to have the right to Bear Arms for a very good reason. The Detroit Free Press - the same outfit that predicted unprecedented violence when Michigan adopted far l...

Freedom for Speech We Fear and Freedom to Fear It
sjgibbs80/flickr In the past few days, I've been asked repeatedly how a liberal free Speech advocate reacts to the debate about violent, Extremist far-right Rhetoric. At first, I instinctively engage in self-censorship, having learned over the years that you cannot criticize inflammatory speech, or worry publicly about its possible consequences, without unintentionally Lending support to Censorship campaigns. You can't speculate about the possible anti-social effects of anti-social Speech with...

Gun bans won't work
Every time a person goes on a Killing Spree politicians start pointing fingers at each other. Liberals claim that the killings represent the need for better Gun Control. Conservatives usually want stiffer punishment, claiming that it’s the people ant not the guns responsible for this tragedy. Already we are seeing signs that the shooter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arozona, Jared Lee Loughner, had serious mental problems. That is our problem with the present Gun Laws. We can’t keep ...

Extremist Rhetoric, Violence and American History
The massacre in Tucson has generated a major and intense debate across the country about whether the overheated political climate—the Rhetoric, the “vitriol, “Extremist Speech”—has influenced or motivated the Tucson shooter to commit his dastardly crime. Just as reflected in the commentary on this site, the national opinion runs the gamut, from holding the shooter solely and 100 percent responsible, to holding personalities such as Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh solely and 100

GOP Rep: Loughner's Beliefs 'The Liberal Of Liberals'
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) says political Rhetoric doesn't really incite violent behavior at all -- but not before describing Arizona shooting suspect Jared Loughner as a "Communist" and "the liberal of liberals." "This guy appears to be a communist," Foxx told the Winston-Salem Journal. "His beliefs are the liberal of the liberals [sic]. There is no evidence whatsoever that this man was influenced by Sarah Palin or anybody in the Republican Party. This man is not a conservative; he's a fan of ...

CBS Attacks 'Permissive Gun Laws' And Gun-Toting Tea Partiers in Wake of Shooting
On Monday's CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric used the Tucson shooting to go after Gun Ownership: "As we reported, Jared Loughner purchased his gun legally....Saturday's attack is now putting the state's Gun Laws under a magnifying glass." In the report that followed, correspondent Dean Reynolds declared: "Arizona has among the most permissive Gun Laws in the nation." Reynolds portrayed Arizona's commitment to Gun Rights as a danger: "The right to ke...

Mental illness expert: Yes, ask whether political climate was a trigger for shooter
Dr. Marvin Swartz, a Professor of psychiatry and leading expert in Mental Illness, told Greg Sargent today that yes, the nation's political climate should be considered in the Jared Lee Loughner case. "It's a reasonable question to ask," Dr. Marvin Swartz, a psychiatry Professor at Duke University who specializes in how environment impacts the behavior of the mentally ill, said in an interview this morning. "The nature of someone's delusions is effected by culture. It's a reasonable line of inq...

Adolf Hitler responsible for Arizona shooting?
While Victims of the Tucson shooting still lied in the Parking Lot, propagandists on the left started to lay the ground work in an attempt to spin the horrific incident into a rightwing self-fulfilling prophesy.  With no regard for the truth, a broad spectrum of liberals jumped on the political vitriol bandwagon attempting to connect Conservatives from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh to the shooting.  However, to date the only information gleaned from the investigation indicate the discov...

Christina Green: A Face of Hope
Video posted on YouTube of Neda Agha-Soltan, shot and killed during election Protests in Tehran on Saturday, June 20, 2009. (Credit: YouTube) Neda Agha-Soltan died of a gunshot wound to the chest on June 20, 2009, in the streets of Tehran during the Iranian election protests. Her violent death was graphically depicted in video and pictures, and she become a worldwide icon, representing the struggle of Iranian Dissidents to bring about changes in the country as the Incumbent President Mahmoud...

Apparently, The Real Culprit In The Giffords Shooting Was…..Guns!
Now that we are a few days from the shooting of Representative Giffords, and the cold blooded Murder of many others, including a judge and a 9 year old, the media and Democrats are slowly ratcheting up the meme that guns are to blame. They haven't dropped their fixation on "vitriolic Speech".......you know, all the blamestorming coming from the mostly liberal media, elected Democrats, and liberal talking heads could be considered "vitriolic speech." You also have Joe Scarborough, RINO, complaini...

Supporters urge Palin to hit back at liberal critics on Giffords shooting
Sarah Palin has stayed mostly silent on the Arizona massacre. This may be smart for her in the long-term - and if so, she is right to take the long-term view. After all, at this point no one should second-guess Palin’s political instincts . You do not rise from PTA mom to the head of the conservative political stratosphere by making dumb moves. Facing a firestorm of unwarranted criticism over gun metaphors that her enemies claim fed the heated political climate surrounding the Tucso...

Congressional leaders lay blame for Tucson killing
Partisan representatives and their aides have slung Rhetoric over the circumstances that led to the Murder of 6, and the wounding of 14 more, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, last weekend.  While Obama assured the country that “the perpetrator of a heinous crime” would be brought to justice, Democrats and Republicans slumped into their comfort zone.  Most media outlets have concluded that Jared Loughner, the man who held the gun, is mentally unstable, yet politi...

The Violent Rhetoric End Game, Revealed.
The “Violent Rhetoric” End Game, Revealed. At last we see the end game of all the weekend “violent rhetoric” talk from the left. Several leading House Democrats blamed the inflammatory rhetoric for contributing to the Tucson massacre, while Republicans denounced criticism of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) following the tragedy. One lawmaker, Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.), has said he would introduce a bill to make it a crime to threaten or incite violence against a federa...

Tucson suspect's troubles didn't keep him from gun
This undated photo obtained from MySpace shows Jarad L. Loughner. At an event roughly three years ago, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords took a question from Jared Loughner, the man accused of trying to assassinate her and killing six other people. According to two of his High School friends the question was essentially this: "What is government if words have no meaning?" Loughner was angry about her response _ she read the question and didn't have much to say. On Sunday, Loughner was charged in the shoot...

Fluvanna sued to make county seal accessible to citizens
A First Amendment battle is brewing in Fluvanna County, Va, where a vote from the board of supervisors, minus Vice Chairman Shaun Kenney, has enacted a law to prevent citizens from using the image of their county seal on publications. It all began when a local blogger, 23-year-old Bryan Rothamel who writes The FLUCO Blog, used the county seal on articles he wrote to keep the community updated about supervisor meetings, activities, and decisions. The problem, according to the supervisors, was tha...

Citing Shooting, Congressmen Eye New Curbs on Political Speech
Shortly after the shooting of Rep. Giffords (D - AZ) in Tucson on Saturday, officials and pundits from across the political spectrum were looking to make political hay out of it, struggling to tie the shooter to some rival political faction or other. Now, however, a number of Congressmen are looking to turn that endeavor into a more concerted effort to introduce a series of new curbs on Political Speech, particularly political dissent, insisting that certain criticism of seated officials...

Limbaugh: Loughner has Democrats full support
Rush Limbaugh continued to push back against Democrats’ criticism of violent Rhetoric in connection with the Tucson shootings, suggesting that the suspected shooter, Jared Loughner, was smirking in his latest photo for a reason. "What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country. He's sitting there in jail. He knows what's going on, he knows that...the Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame. He knows if he plays...

Sheriff in Giffords case lashes out about politics
(01-10) 15:25 PST Tucson, Ariz. (AP) -- Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was thrust into the spotlight to face a nation demanding answers in the aftermath of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He didn't mince words. The rampage, he said, grew in part from extreme political Rhetoric, Bigotry and hatred, especially in his home state of Arizona. Dupnik said he was angry and heartbroken over the tragedy, and was simply speaking his mind as an American, not a Law Enforcement official. But ...

U.S. public says Giffords shooting, rhetoric unrelated
Most Americans see no relation between the attempted Assassination of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the political tactic of lacing vitriolic Rhetoric with Firearms analogies. That’s the conclusion of a CBS News poll that found most Republicans (69 pct), most Independents (56 pct) and even a plurality of Democrats (49 pct) believe the two phenomena unrelated. Those numbers add up to 57 percent of Americans overall — a true majority though not quite big enough to break a Se...

Sheriff Dupnik Spoke Out Against Conceal & Carry Laws
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been a vocal critic of conceal and carry laws in Arizona. Dupnik believed that such laws would further endanger innocent bystanders in these situations. Recent multiple homicides on college campuses, like those that occurred at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, have inflamed the national community and brought about a call to arms that is at once understandable and dangerous. Currently, 13 states are considering Legislation that would allow i...

One wonders what we will learn from these senseless shootings
The moment of silence came and went Monday, and I tried to set aside my own anger and heed President Barack Obama's call "for us to come together as a nation in prayer or reflection, keeping the Victims and their families closely at heart." The quiet passed, and I was revisited by the uneasy sense we are unlikely to learn anything from Saturday's tragedy in Tucson. Is the lesson of the deadly shooting destined to be buried with the dead in a country that day by day watches its ability to reason ...

Lawmaker calls for briefing on mental health danger signs
A leading lawmaker on Mental Health issues is calling for a Bipartisan debate on how to keep lawmakers and their staff and families safe in the wake of Saturday's deadly shooting in Tucson. Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Calif.), co-chair of the Congressional Mental Health Caucus along with Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Penn.), wants the group to hold a briefing focusing on the behaviors and threats that raise red flags. "Police agencies already do that," Napolitano told The Hill. "I want to make sure some of ...

Republican Wants To Ban Guns Within 1,000 Feet Of Members Of Congress
This is going to have the same problem that Gun Free School Zone Acts of 1990 and 1995 had. You cannot remove someone’s 2nd amendment right to keep and Bear Arms just because they live near a school, and I’m not sure that simply being near a member of Congress is enough to remove those rights either. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), one of the few pro-gun control Republicans in the House, wants to make it illegal for someone to knowingly carry a gun within 1,000 feet of certain high-ranking...

Peter King's silly gun ban idea
Yesterday I argued that Congress should respond to the shooting in Arizona by encouraging staff members to exercise their Second Amendment rights, going through a professional training program on self-defense and obtaining their concealed carry permits. But if you want to see the opposite suggestion, it comes from anti-gun New York Republican Congressman Peter King, who intends to introduce Legislation which would ban people from carrying a gun within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress. Politico...