To make sense of the senseless, to ascribe motive to the maniac is, by its very nature, impossible. While we the sane may never understand what caused 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner to execute six and injure 14, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, at a congressional constituent meet-and-greet, we mustn’t be resigned to allow such acts to occur as the “price of freedom.”Loughner was, by all accounts, a troubled individual. A high school dropout, he had been arrested for marijuana possession, a charge that denied him entry into the Army. In recent years, he became increasingly eccentric, keeping a shrine containing a model human skull in his backyard, advocating lucid dreaming, considered to be a form of hallucinating, and was fond of sitting in random unlocked cars.
On his YouTube page, Loughner posted text videos of wildly disjointed statements and redundant logical syllogisms. He ravingly implored viewers to become treasurers of a new currency, and claimed that “the government is implying [sic] mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.”
Indeed, Loughner met and queried the Congresswoman Giffords in 2007, and was said to be unsatisfied with her response, later calling her “stupid and unintelligent.” His question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
In the aftermath of the Tucson Massacre, it is readily apparent that Loughner suffered from delusions of persecution; that, with his odd behavior, has led mental health professionals from around the country to conclude that Loughner has paranoid schizophrenia, which manifests itself around the age of 20.
Any debate on the political environment or gun control is tangential.
Loughner’s mind didn’t process cogent political arguments; and it isn’t the status quo of gun control that should be changed to prevent massacres perpetrated by the mentally ill. That would only serve to limit the freedom of innocent gun owners; no, it is the status quo in regards to how society flags and treats the mentally disturbed that must change. Failing to adapt would be failing to learn from this tragedy and would make similar events that much more inevitable in the future.
If any community was to catch a troubled individual before he struck out, Arizona, ironically, may be the state with the best resources. The Copper State is one of a handful of states that allows involuntary commitment, not only for individuals dangerous to themselves as well as others, but also allows commitment for drug abuse, alcoholism, or mental retardation.
Loughner had a drug possession on his rap sheet, and five contacts with Pima Community College Campus Police, all for behavioral infractions. His professors noticed that the young man was eccentric; his philosophy professor noted that Loughner turned in a paper containing only geometric figures. But professors were unable to council Loughner as the college has a policy in which a student must “self-identify” his own problem before receiving help. He never engaged with his professors enough to allow them to offer assistance.
While some thought Loughner was in need of help, others were decisively frightened by him. A student sat at the desk by the door, with her purse ready, should Loughner start shooting; a student dropped a class with him, because she was uncomfortable with his in-class outbursts; another professor was afraid to turn his back on him to write on the blackboard.
After complaints and police contacts, the college finally suspended Loughner in September after he posted a video of himself touring the campus after dark while ranting about the “genocide college.” The college stipulated that he would need a mental health clearance before returning, but he withdrew from school the following month. Even being privy to his strange conduct, the College failed in its fiduciary duty to protect its staff and students, if Loughner had tried to commit a violent reprisal.
If the College failed to proactively prevent the shooting, local law enforcement similarly failed to reactively protect the community. After the Massacre, the Democratic Sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik took little time in attributing the violence to that of a political dissident, noting Arizona’s 8th Congressional District’s “vitriolic political environment,” and the contentious campaign Giffords had recently run.
To know what caused it, Dupnik must have known the events that led up to the assassination attempt: in August of 2009, in the midst of the rancorous healthcare reform debates, a gun was found at Giffords’ “Congress on Your Corner” event; in March of 2010, her offices were vandalized after she cast her vote in favor of “Obamacare;” and she had just resisted the tide, winning a hard-fought race against a Tea Party candidate in a Republican wave election.
Yet, knowing all of this, Sheriff Dupnik allowed Gabrielle Giffords to meet with her constituents, the hallmark of a healthy democracy, at that fateful “Congress on Your Corner” event outside a suburban Tucson Safeway supermarket, without a single policeman serving as security. In so doing, Dupnik has failed so badly that we are left literally thankful that the bullet went through the Congresswoman’s brain instead of exploding inside (thus allowing for a far better prognosis). The gap in between what Dupnik claimed to have known and the way in which he prepared is wildly incongruent, unbefitting an officer of the peace, and, again, failed his community.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how many bullets Loughner’s extended clip held (30), or whether the free speech of dissenting individuals caused him to turn to violence. Innocent individuals are not guilty of what a madman does. If we are ever to stymie similar atrocities in the future, the status quo that must change is how we engage the mentally ill. We can no longer ignore the homeless who mumble to themselves, or the 20-somethings who exhibit a newfound, ardent streak of rebelliousness.
Whether its Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech Massacre, or Jared Lee Loughner, this fact holds true: insane killers, determined to kill, will kill; it doesn’t matter if they have 30 bullets or no bullets. They will find that way to put rat poison in the cafeteria soup. To prevent these avoidable massacres we need not limit their weapons but limit their contact with the Free Society. We, of course, cannot ban soup, right?