SHAMWOW

I put "modern" in there because the Tea Party has existed for a long time. It was originally run by Ron Paul libertarians, but highjacked by media corporatists after the 2008 election and transformed into what we know it to be today.

Anyway, the FBI found a letter in Loughner's home.

[T]wo law enforcement sources said that FBI agents had found a 2007 letter from Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) to the shooting suspect, with the words "Die, bitch" and "Die, cops" scrawled on it. The letter, which thanked [Jared] Loughner for attending an event of hers, was found in a safe in his Tuscon home, the sources said.

It's difficult to say if his words were written in 2007. The letter itself is from 2007, but there's still nothing to suggest he couldn't have written on it the morning he left with the gun too.

Additionally, the New York Times put together a good profile of the shooter and his family.

A friend of Mr. Loughner’s also said in an interview on Tuesday that Mr. Loughner, 22, was skilled with a gun — as early as high school — and had talked about a philosophy of fostering chaos.

[...]

“He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos, and that is probably why he did the shooting, along with the fact he was sick in the head,” said Zane Gutierrez, 21, who was living in a trailer outside Tucson and met Mr. Loughner sometimes to shoot at cans for target practice.

The Loughner family released a statement on Tuesday, its first since the attacks, expressing — in a six-line document handed to reporters outside their house — sorrow for the losses experienced by the victims and their families.

“It may not make any difference, but we wish that we could change the heinous events of Saturday,” the statement said. “There are no words that can possibly express how we feel. We wish that there were, so we could make you feel better.”

The new details from Mr. Gutierrez about Mr. Loughner — including his philosophy of anarchy and his expertise with a handgun, suggest that the earliest signs of behavior that may have ultimately led to the attacks started several years ago.

Mr. Gutierrez said his friend had become obsessed with the meaning of dreams and their importance. He talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “The Will To Power” [lol nietzsche] and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing. And every day, his friend said, Mr. Loughner would get up and write in his dream journal, recording the world he experienced in sleep and its possible meanings.

“Jared felt nothing existed but his subconscious,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “The dream world was what was real to Jared, not the day-to-day of our lives.”

And that dream world, his friend said, could be downright strange.

“He would ask me constantly, ‘Do you see that blue tree over there?’ He would admit to seeing the sky as orange and the grass as blue,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “Normal people don’t talk about that stuff.”

He added that Mr. Loughner “used the word hollow to describe how fake the real world was to him.”

As his behavior grew more puzzling to his friends, he was getting better with a pistol. Starting in high school, Mr. Loughner honed his marksmanship with a 9-millimeter pistol, the same caliber weapon used in the attack Saturday, until he became proficient at handling the weapon and firing it quickly.

“If he had a gun pointed at me, there is nothing I could do because he would make it count,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “He was quick.”

He also said that Mr. Loughner had increasing trouble interacting in social settings — during one party, for instance, Mr. Loughner retreated upstairs alone to a room and was found reading a dictionary.

Jared Loughner’s retreat — whether into the desert with his gun, or into the recesses of his dreams — coincided with a broader retreat by the Loughner family that left them increasingly isolated from their community, neighbors said.

His father, Randy, once more of a presence in their mostly working-class neighborhood in northwest Tucson as he went off to work as a carpet-layer and pool-deck installer, became a silent and often sullen presence.

One neighbor, George Gayan, who said he had known the family for 30 years, described a kind of a gradual “pulling back” by the family.

“People do this for different reasons,” said Mr. Gayan, 82. “I don’t know why.”

Some years ago, Randy Loughner built a wall to shield the side porch of the family’s home. Because of his often bellicose attitude, neighbors sometimes kept their distance.

Leslie Cooper owns the house next door, where her son and his family live. She recounted a time when her grandchildren would not chase after a ball that landed in the Loughners’ backyard.

“They had to buy a new one,” said Ms. Cooper, who was told of the incident by her son. “I’d tell my son, those are not normal people over there — there’s a reason why they stick to themselves,” she said, adding that she had warned him to steer clear of Randy Loughner.

“I said, be careful around that guy — don’t get him angry,” she added.

Other people in the neighborhood, though, said they saw glimpses of compassion in the Loughner family, and an ability to reach out to others, sometimes unexpectedly.

Richard Mckinley, 41, whose mother lives down the street from the Loughners, said his mother appreciated how Randy and Amy Loughner were among the first people to visit when her husband died two years ago.

“They were some of the first people to pay respects,” he said.

In contrast to the reputation of his father, Jared Loughner’s mother, Amy, is considered pleasant but reserved by those who know her.

She commuted about an hour each day to her job managing Agua Caliente Park, an area of spring-fed ponds surrounded by giant palm trees in the desert on the outskirts of Tucson. The impeccably maintained park was quiet Tuesday, but for the chirping of the dozens of species of birds that call it home and the occasional crunch of a birder’s hiking boots along the trails.

Donna DeHaan, a former board member of the nonprofit group that helps support the park, said Ms. Loughner was a reliable manager with a good background in environmental issues. Ms. DeHaan said she never spoke about her family but was always pleasant, if a tad quiet and shy.

Mr. Gutierrez said he sensed very little communication within the family when he was among them.

“Every time I met his parents they were kind of quiet and estranged,” he said. Jared Loughner did not complain about his parents, Mr. Gutierrez said, and seemed to simply accept the lack of interaction as a fact of life.

“Jared really did not talk to his parents or talk about them,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “I felt they were not really good reaching out and he was not good at reaching out to his parents.”

After his arrest for possession of drug paraphernalia in 2007, Mr. Loughner was ordered to attend a diversion program run by the county attorney’s office. The chief deputy county attorney, Amelia Craig Cramer, said the program is intended for first-time offenders who have no history of violence or serious mental illness.

Mr. Loughner was referred to an approved drug education program, and completed the required sessions in 30 days.

But the program is primarily educational, Ms. Cramer said, focused on “the dangers of drugs and the dangers of substance abuse,” rather than the kind of in-depth counseling that friends, including Mr. Gutierrez, strongly felt that Mr. Loughner needed.

“It got worse over time,” Mr. Gutierrez said. He said he stopped talking to Mr. Loughner last March, when their interactions grew increasingly unpredictable and troubling.

“He would call me at 2 a.m. and asked, ‘Are you hanging out in front of my house, stalking me?’ He started to get really paranoid, and said he did not want to see us anymore and did not trust us,” Mr. Gutierrez said, referring to himself and another friend. “He thought we were plotting to kill him or steal his car.”

Nothing we've heard so far suggests he was motivated by politics. It sounds a lot like schizophrenia to me. Rand Paul thought so too - "...from a medical point of view there's a lot to suggest paranoid schizophrenia..." - but this liberal website decides to make fun of him without bothering to read anything about schizophrenia. Stop being such a bandwagon, you fucking idiots.

I think we're missing a huge discussion here. Jared Loughner bought his gun legally. He was deemed mentally fit to own a firearm. I like guns. I don't own any and I don't think I want to, but that doesn't prevent me from supporting the second amendment, and every person's right to protect himself if he needs to. But when schizophrenics can legally purchase guns, something needs to change.

The entry venting all of my initial reactions to the shooting on Saturday was written as it was all happening. Everyone was getting information for the first time, and seeing so much of it in such a short amount of time made me really fucking angry. It's interesting reading it again. I've had time to calm down and process things since then, and I don't necessarily agree with all of it anymore. I really make an effort not to do that, but with emotions running so high, I'm not the least bit surprised by the things I said. As always, however, the voices of logic are right. It doesn't matter how much we're annoyed by the right wing unknowingly egging on potential maniacs, we still have no idea what this guy's motives were. And thank god he was caught alive, or else we'd be speculating forever.

But I'm not going to apologize for anything I said. I will not stop ridiculing people like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck for potentially sparking things like this, because we should've put this much ferocity into ridiculing their violent language years ago. And while we may not know what the motives are yet for this particular attack, we do know that there has been instances in the past where the language used by Republicans and Tea Partiers have sparked maniacs into acting maniacal. Here, read the top post if you want a list.

Liberals might be acting a little over the top right now, but we need to understand why. We didn't jump to such dramatic conclusions for no reason. We have been expecting something like this to happen for a very long time, and it is extremely important to realize that. When you make maps that use gun sights to pinpoint the locations of Democrats, don't be surprised if we freak out when a Democratic politician is fucking shot.

Jon Stewart was good tonight.

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