Perhaps the only thing more depressing than this weekend's assassination shooting of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was the fact that it was so utterly unsurprising. The shooting, which for the moment remains an attempted assassination as its intended target fights for her life in hospital, so far has a death toll of six out of 20 people shot. For many observers in the US, the shooting is the culmination of two years of incendiary rhetoric from the right, an episode of far-right violence that people have been warning was coming soon. When you have mainstream American politicians telling people that the government is trying to establish "death panels" in its healthcare legislation and that there has been a "Socialist takeover" of the government that can only be brought to an end using "second amendment remedies", it was only a matter of time before some unhinged person on the far right acted out in violence.The motives of the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, are not yet clear. In fact authorities are looking into the possibility of a second shooter. It is not yet known whether Loughner had any specific ties to the Tea Party movement, whether he was an admirer of Sarah Palin, or whether he was a fan of incendiary Fox News hosts such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly. But from his online postings and notes, it already seems clear that Loughner subscribed to far right ideology. His online postings and YouTube videos rant against government tyranny, using language that is eerily reminiscent of the language the mainstream right has been increasingly using. In one of his postings, Loughner refers disparagingly to 'currency that's not backed by gold or silver' - an idea that is the subject of regular rants on Mr. Beck's show (right before his commercials for gold investment). This idea that a non-gold-backed currency is unconstitutional was also a main focus of the anti-government 'patriot movement' of the 1990's that was responsible for violence in the middle part of that decade. Loughner also went on long rants about immigration, particularly Hispanic immigrants in Arizona.
