My mom and I were in Colorado when this happened. My mom lives in Tucson (in fact I was born at UMC, where Giffords is) and says that if she had been in town, she would have been at that event. Frightening to think about :X
I can’t stop thinking about the 9 year old girl who was killed. It’s just heartbreaking.
The freakiest thing about that mugshot is that this creep looks happy! All the photos from the past show a gloomy, despressed guy, but now he’s happy. I wonder if he did it to get attention, like that guy who shot Reagan.
Get arrested often enough and you never have to pay for a haircut.
This is when I briefly envy Third World countries. DISCLAIMER: I would NEVER actually want to trade places or governments, but I do envy them the immediate gratification of this.
In the US there’s going to be a series of trials and it’s going to cost millions even though his guilt is beyond doubt and there’ll be hours of debate about whether he deserves the death penalty due to his insanity and Nancy Grace will be using a vibrator on air for a week and Anderson Cooper will be interviewing a panel that includes a death penalty lawyer, George Stephanopopalous and Jaleel White (the guy who played Urkel) on the merits of it, and it’ll take years and cost millions before he either begins his final sentence or gets executed.
In Third Worlds, he’d have already had the hell beaten out of him, been drug behind a truck through the town square, and what was left of him would have been publicly beheaded and I am sure would not have been smiling. The cost would be negligible, the guilt factor is the same as that of a long drawn out trial, and while its barbaric and symptomatic of a dysfunctional hellhole of a place, you must admit in this instance it’s far more viscerally satisfying than trials and postponements and finally a sterile dispatch or a padded cell.
Joke would’ve been funnier if you didn’t explain it.
Unless he was a cousin of the President, in which case he would have been appointed Minister of Defense.
Has anyone seen the Congresswoman’s birth certificate?
Watching MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan show, Congressman Joe Crowley (D. NY) said something I had never considered about the mentally ill:
“Hospitals don’t want to take these patients because they lose money on them.”
Is that the case? That sounds like an excellent argument against for-profit health care.
Humourous photo - In a moment of sobriety, Glenn Beck finds his son.
Yeah- I’ve been pretty dispassionate about the whole thing, except for when I was watching yesterday’s daily news conference update, when they had the family members of the victims speaking. The husband of the woman that took the little girl, who was their neighbor, said that his wife, who is sedated pretty heavily, keeps yelling out “Christina, we’ve got to get out of here!” That just tore me up. 
Damn. I wonder if that’s been photoshopped.
And the cause of deaths listed as cholera.
As it says on the site, the photo’s been tinkered with. Still, it doesn’t seem to be that much of a stretch from the way Beck usually looks, does it? 
I have been reading reports that Laughner’s father confronted him that morning just before the shootings as he was taking a bag out of the trunk of one of the family’s vehicles. Jared Loughner ran off into the desert. His father attempted to catch up to him but lost him. Loughner then caught a cab to the Congresswoman’s event afterwards. I can’t imagine how devastated his parents are. I feel for them. They knew he wasn’t behaving appropriately, but what could they have done? Their son was an adult, and even though he was living under their roof, there is very little one can force an adult son to do, short of kicking him out. And that wouldn’t have prevented him from going through with it, anyway.
Apparently the Pima Commnunity College Department of Public Safety has released some documents related to their interactions with Mr. Loughner.
This linkwill take you to the 51 pages of the documents on the New York Times website.
This link takes you to the documents in PDF form. Beware it is rather large.
I’ve only looked through the first couple of reports but it seems clear to me he has been undergoing some serious mental breakdown for a while. I’m not a mental health professional so feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
Indeed. Just a couple of weeks ago here in Bangkok, a 16-year-old girl driving without a license (legal driving age is 18 in Thailand, no exceptions) caused an accident that killed nine people, while she walked away with scratches. BUT … she has an important family name – no, not THAT family – and so is at home “pending the investigation,” which no one expects much will come of. (Locals are realizing this and making death threats against her, but it’ll die down.) Even though the authorities could charge the parents with a crime for allowing the girl to borrow the car, they’ve already said they won’t, because the girl “didn’t intend” to kill anyone. :rolleyes:
But for a nobody like this jerkoff in Tucson, yeah, they would have kicked the holy shit out of him by now, or worse.
They just had the memorial service. Look at the expression on John McCain’s face in the photos accompanying this artitcle about it.
The morbidly curious part of me would like to see the YouTube video about Pima Community College and genocide reference.
For those who haven’t read them, in several incidents between January and September 2010 he caused major enough disruptions in class for the professor to call security at least 4 times. He went into a tirade about abortion and strapping dynamite to babies during a writing class when somebody’s poem mentioned abortion, he got into an argument with a math professor insisting that the number 6 was 18 in another class, made a Pilates instructor feel physically intimidated for giving him a B, and then having a fit because he only received half credit for a late assignment in a Biology class. In all of them he ranted about his Freedom of Speech being violated by the school and the professor and how this was a scam and he paid the professor’s salary, etc., but wanted to remain in school. (Major sense both of persecution and entitlement.) He was finally delivered an Immediate Suspension Notice at home and posted a crazy video on YouTube under the user name 2Ploy that accused the school of being a scam and fostering genocide.
I think he’s trying to figure out why the hell that black guy won’t stop talking and help set up the buffet before Reagan’s plane lands.
My dad has an interesting take on this. He’s in Vegas, which I realize is not Tucson, but it’s different from, quote “Cal-ee-fornia, where it’s your pot they’ll have to take from your cold dead hands.” He says the gun culture there is so prevalent, and people so reactionary, that if it hadn’t been this guy shooting Giffords, it would have been some other redneck shooting someone else. Just sharing.