Guns Don't Kill People: Cowards and Lobbyists Do

Like many people who have come forward to speak or write about the Tucson massacre, I know and adore Gabby Giffords. It is virtually impossible not to adore her. She has a presence and graciousness that light up a room.

That she survived a shot from a semi-automatic at close range is remarkable. Yet the trauma she has endured -- psychologically and neurologically -- is not one that ever leaves a person untouched. The only question at this point is how much of that radiant light anyone who knows her has seen in her eyes and her smile will return. And for that, we can only hope, pray, and wait for her brain to heal itself.

We know little about the events that led to her shooting, to the deaths of at least six people, and to the massacre that left 14 others injured on the ground. But we do know three things.

The first is that the man witnesses have identified as the shooter, who did everything he could to destroy the brains of his victims, was likely himself the victim of a damaged brain. Even before reporters started to interview his professors and college classmates who were frightened by his erratic behavior in class last fall, the three YouTube videos he left as testimony to his mental state left no doubt that he is delusional and probably in the midst of a psychotic episode (a fancy way of saying that his brain is no longer functioning so that he can tell reality from unreality -- even by Tea Party standards).

We know a great deal more about illnesses such as schizophrenia than we knew when our laws on "insanity" evolved. Perhaps most importantly, we now know that the kind of conceptual and linguistic incoherence in Jared Loughner's YouTube videos is the result of a broken brain -- more "madness" than "badness," although we do not yet know enough about him to know how clear the line between them is, in his case.

Allowing someone who is clearly paranoid, delusional and incoherent -- in the midst of a psychotic episode -- to have a semi-automatic weapon in his hands is like putting a car in the hands of someone in the midst of an epileptic seizure during rush-hour traffic. Should Loughner turn out to be psychotic and brain-diseased, as appears to be the case, he will be no more genuinely culpable for the acts he has committed, regardless of what the law says, than a person who had his first seizure while driving through a crowded Tucson intersection. Less can be said for our political leaders -- a point to which we shall shortly return.

Second, the fact that the shooter is mentally ill does not mean that his mind and brain exist in a vacuum. When Bill O'Reilly and his ilk on Fox began their attacks on "Tiller the Killer" -- George Tiller, the physician who provided legal abortions until he was gunned down in his church in the name of Jesus -- they fired the first shots in the uncivil war that has just claimed six more lives. To make the claim that the constant propagandizing against Tiller by a television network -- including the publicizing of his whereabouts -- played no role in the events that led an assassin to choose him as his target would be as psychotic as Loughner's YouTube diatribes. Surely a deranged killer could have found someone else to target among the over 300 million people who call this country home.

But the fact that the causal link between Fox's jihad against an American citizen and his ultimate assassination at the hands of a religiously motivated terrorist never became a topic of widespread discussion except on a couple of evening shows on MSNBC, that it prompted no change in the way the right-wing propaganda machine has vilified American citizens, and that it prompted little more than one or two brief written statements from our top elected officials, is a profound indictment of both our media and our political system.