Quote Originally Posted by gwahir View Post
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.