Thread: Violent rhetoric and the shooting in AZ

Originally Posted by gwahir

I find this blindingly naive.

If the religion or political party is making statements that DIRECTLY refer to violence, and actively telling people to go out and do these things, they can absolutely be blamed.

I don't know how that fits in this case, admittedly. But, let's say a guy pulls a gun on Harry Reid or even Obama and yells "This is for you, Sarah!", after which we find he was an avid conservative with a browsing history of nothing but GOP websites and a wall of posters lined with quotations from Palin et al encouraging "second amendment solutions"... would you still say what you're saying now?

Again, I'm not specifically referring to the incident with Gifford. This is a hypothetical. I'm challenging your notion that you can't blame a party for the behaviour of the fringe. You can think of another example with, for instance, a radical Muslim whose walls are lined with violent passages from the Qu'ran.

It is not naive, it is holding people responsible for their own actions. You're talking as if people don't have free will. I will admit that I am a bit understudied on the 'second amendment solutions' quote, and know little of the context in which it was used, but no matter what any politician says you can't blame them for things like this. Even in your scenario, Sarah Palin isn't telling people to go kill other people, and it isn't her fault that there are some people who not only think that's what she's saying but who are also crazy enough to go and do it just because some person on TV told them to. Politicians have a social responsibility to be reasonable, but at the same time every individual has a social responsibility to be rational.

What if, say, Obama or Harry Reid said that all guns needed to be outlawed and that there needed to be a 'solution' to those who promote 'second amendment solutions', then a person went out and stabbed the head of the NRA while screaming 'This is for you, Barack'? Would it then be the fault of the left that this random insane individual decided to take the message they heard, contort it, and try to make it a reality by any means necessary?

At the end of the day, there are always going to be insane people who get behind a movement or idea and take it too far to the extreme. There have been people like this throughout all of history on all sides of all political spectra. There is just no solution, and no one is to blame but the people who commit the atrocities.

Originally Posted by gwahir

If people on the left encouraged "second amendment solutions", and told everyone to solve their problems with violence, then YES. Palin's catchcry is "don't retreat, reload"!

Re. the gun-sights map:

Also, the "second amendment solutions" quote is actually not Palin's, so I apologise for getting that wrong. It was actually Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle, and the exact wording was "second amendment remedies" (which, if anything, sounds worse, to me).

If, in your example, Obama and Reid and Pelosi were using this kind of language, and there was a Tea Party equivalent for the Left, then yes, I think it would be utterly fair to apportion them some blame. As with what I said about the Qu'ran: if it's explicitly in the teachings, the philosophies, the holy documents, the written, spoken and defended statements of the leaders, then I definitely think that the construct of the party/group/religion deserves a share of the blame.

I'm not acting like people don't have free will. You're acting like people's decisions are made without external input of stimuli like religious and political conviction. It is naive to imagine a neat line dividing "crazy" and "sane" when it comes to violence for that reason.

People's decisions are affected by external stimuli, yes, but it is still up to the person how to process that stimuli and what actions to take. We can't stop religious and political groups from expressing their opinions (well, could, but shouldn't), and that wouldn't help even if we did. The problem isn't the institutions or what they say, it is how they are interpreted.

It is pretty clear (at least to me) that 'Don't Retreat, Reload' is just a play on words. I can't really speak on Sharron Angle, as I don't know the context of her statement, but Sarah Palin is not telling people to go out and shoot people. She is using wordplay in an attempt to make her message of resolve more memorable. Some people may have chosen to interpret it to mean go out and shoot people, but it isn't the spirit of the message. The same can be said about the wording of religious texts. When read out of context or translated in the right way you can make almost anything sound bad.

You can't just generalize and place sweeping blame due to misinterpretation and bad processing of stimuli unless your argument is that no religious or political stimuli should exist, since anything can be misinterpreted by a perverse enough mind. I don't think it is naive to say that there is a line between someone who hears a message and uses it to modify or bolster their opinions, voting, and activism and someone who hears that same message and decides it means they should go out and kill people.