http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/opinion/10mon1.html?_r=1&ref=opinionBloodshed and Invective in ArizonaShe read the First Amendment on the House floor — including the guarantee of “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” — and then flew home to Arizona to put those words into practice. But when Gabrielle Giffords tried to meet with her constituents in a Tucson parking lot on Saturday, she came face to face with an environment wholly at odds with that constitutional ideal, and she nearly paid for it with her life.
Jared Loughner, the man accused of shooting Ms. Giffords, killing a federal judge and five other people, and wounding 13 others, appears to be mentally ill. His paranoid Internet ravings about government mind control place him well beyond usual ideological categories.
But he is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery. With easy and legal access to semi-automatic weapons like the one used in the parking lot, those already teetering on the edge of sanity can turn a threat into a nightmare.
Last spring, Capitol security officials said threats against members of Congress had tripled over the previous year, almost all of them from opponents of health care reform. An effigy of Representative Frank Kratovil Jr., Democrat of Maryland, was hung on a gallows outside his district office. Ms. Giffords’s own district office door was smashed on the night of the health care vote, possibly by a bullet.
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