by Damon Martin
Jared Lee Loughner: It’s a name that will live forever in American infamy. The 22-year old was responsible for killing six people and injuring a further 14 on Saturday at a political gathering outside a supermarket in Tuscon, AZ. Among the dead was a Federal Judge and a 9-year old girl. Those wounded include Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, who it’s understood was the focus of the attack. Loughner stood before a judge for the first time on Monday, facing multiple charges that will likely land him in jail for life or end in the death penalty.
It was ironic that just two days after the shootings took place, the Showtime network had a planned broadcast of Michael Moore’s 2002 Academy Award winning film Bowling for Columbine. The film focused on gun control and the lack thereof in the United States, and the tragic events leading up to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre that claimed 13 lives and injured a further 21 people. In the film, Moore went to great lengths to try to educate and inform the audience about how easy it is for guns to get into the hands of those with unstable minds.
Fast forward 8 years to Tuscon, AZ, where Loughner opened fire on a crowd gathered during Representative Giffords’ meeting with her constituents.
Loughner was described by many that knew him as a disturbed individual. He was dismissed from Pima Community College for unstable behavior, and was also denied admission to the U.S. Army for unknown reasons (but given that standards for admittance have been lowered considerably, it’s easy for certain conclusions to be drawn).
Despite these past occurrences, Loughner had no issue in purchasing the 9mm weapon in November 2010 that he used to gun down the victims in Tuscon. Furthermore it also transpired that Loughner was turned away when he initially attempted to purchase ammunition for the weapon at a local Wal-Mart .
Loughner’s answer to being turned down by Wal-Mart? Yep, you guessed it – he drove across town to a different Wal-Mart. The second Wal-Mart store sold Loughner the ammunition that killed six people.
The comparisons to Moore’s film once again crosses my mind, in particular the scenes in which the Michigan native visits K-Mart with two victims from the Columbine massacre who still had bullets lodged in their bodies. The shooters had purchased ammunition from a K-Mart store and the later used it in the weapons that killed 12 students and one teacher at the small Colorado high school. In the company of Moore, the two victims ask for refunds for the bullets still inside of them. Eventually, after Moore pays a visit to the store’s head office with cameras in tow, K-Mart decides to stop selling ammunition at their stores nationwide.
Let’s hope Wal-Mart follow suit in the wake of this terrible tragedy.
Many of the media reports on the Loughner shooting have focused on connecting it to the crazed fanaticism surrounding the political climate in and around Arizona before the tragedy. Governor Sarah Palin had put up a map on her website urging voters to take “aim” at certain hotly contested areas, which were marked ominously with gun sights. One of the places marked was Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ district.
The poster (see above) and accompanying rhetoric on Palin’s website has since been removed.
But putting aside the role that political grandstanding and rhetoric played in this senseless tragedy, the truth is Loughner was a disturbed individual who should never have been allowed to own a gun. What people should be focusing is the ease in which he was able to purchase a hand gun and ammunition, especially given that he’d posted disturbing messages online on video and social networking sites that no one caught until it was too late.
As Representative Giffords lays in her hospital bed in a medically induced coma, so many questions are left unanswered, but for a nation seemingly hell bent on destroying itself from the inside out, is arming more people really the answer?
Watch Bowling for Columbine and then the news surrounding this tragedy in Tuscon, and ask yourself what will it take for us to finally learn?
