Crumbler

My friend Ruben called me yesterday, after word got out about the shootings in his adopted home state of Arizona. “It finally happened,” he said. ‘Finally’ being the key word — for those of us who have lived in Arizona, yesterday’s events had a disturbing sense of inevitability. We had been waiting, powerless, for something like this to happen.

In Arizona, politicians are used to finding themselves in the literal line of fire. In August of 2009, during the height of health-care reform demonstrations, a protester was removed from a Giffords event at a supermarket when his pistol fell out of his holster and on to the floor. Months eariler, the glass front door of her office was shattered. During the general election campaign this year, her Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, invited supporters to come shoot automatic weapons with him. “Get on target for victory,” his ad read. “Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office.” Kelly failed at the polls, but an automatic weapon may have removed Giffords from office after all. 

It’s not just Giffords who is under siege, of course. In July, a window in the district office of Rep. Raul Grijalva was shattered by a bullet. Former Rep. Harry Mitchell, like Giffords a centrist Democrat, quit holding town halls after receiving death threats. Former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick walked out on a constituent chat at a Safeway when it turned ugly, for which she was roundly mocked. I still shudder when I think of the man who carried an assault rifle at a protest when President Obama came to Arizona for a speech. The other day, lest she forget where she came from, someone sent an incendiary device through the mail to Arizona’s old governor, Janet Napolitano. 

And so you understand what Ruben meant when he said, “It finally happened.” And the truth is it has been happening in Arizona for a while.

I lived in Arizona for the past six years, covering state politics for the paper. I knew Gabby Giffords when she was a state senator. She was always well liked, well respected. In 2006, when Republican Rep. Jim Kolbe announced he would not seek re-election, her entry into the race all but guaranteed the seat would go to the Democrats. Since then she has been a mostly reliable Democratic vote, but also a Blue Dog who favors gun rights and adding National Guard troops to the state’s border with Mexico. Last week she introduced legislation to reduce Congressional salaries by 5 percent. Arizona Democrats considered her the last real star they had left; Republicans won every statewide office in 2010, and their previous big star, Napolitano, is likely never coming back.

For her part, Gov. Jan Brewer called yesterday’s shooting “an unbelievable tragedy.” “One of which, of course, in our worst nightmares we … never could have imagined would take place.”

And yet we could imagine it, of course — have been imagining it for years. Around the Web yesterday, I read many pundits cautioning us not to draw conclusions about yesterday’s shooting — no pointing fingers, no rushing to judgment, no adding two and two together. “The shooter is neither left-wing nor right-wing,” wrote Erick Erickson at Redstate. “He is crazy and evil.”

And yet it seems to me that the shooter could be crazy and evil and also affected by his political environment. From YouTube, we see that unlike most 22-year-olds he knew enough about politics to know the number of his Congressional district. He had previously attended a Giffords constituent event, and in the affidavit released Sunday he reportedly referred to his plans as an “assassination.” Crazy, evil, and political.

That’s what the Pima County sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, was talking about at his press conference. 

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government,” he said. “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

If that sounds over the top, I’d encourage you read the work of Stephen Lemons, the Phoenix New Times columnist who has devoted more energy than anyone to writing about the presence of white supremacist elements in the state. (He’s done important work describing the ties of the Senate president, Russell Pearce, to the white supremacist J.T. Ready.)

Today at my new job I was asked to help write a follow-up piece on the shooting, and one of the people I interviewed was Chris Carson. Carson used to run the company that provides mental health services in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. He talked with me about how difficult it is to distinguish between people who simply have strange beliefs, people who are mentally ill, and people who are mentally ill and violent. To predict such an outburst is all but impossible, he said, particularly with someone who has never previously hurt someone. 

But for me, the most interesting part of our conversation came when Carson told me that the shooter likely could not help but be shaped by the toxic political environment in Arizona.

“I’m like the sheriff in Pima County — I think the atmosphere lends itself to this kind of thing,” Carson said. “That’s my own belief, that’s not a professional belief. But you look at Dallas 1963” — the site of the Kennedy assassination — “and it was highly charged politically. They were spitting at JFK and Jackie. It was a highly charged place. Those things affect people, affect events. And Arizona is a highly charged place.”

Maybe there’s nothing we can do to stop the occasional deranged shooter from mass-murdering innocents. And maybe the Giffords shooting was less a political act than a purely crazy one. But no one can deny that yesterday’s murders were part of a pattern of intimidation against Arizona elected officials that stretches back for years. We ought to confront that fact head on, if only to honor everyone who went to meet their congresswoman yesterday and wound up staring down the barrel of a madman’s gun.