The Arizona Killings

Visibly affected by events, the sheriff of Pima county, Arizona, recounting the horrific shooting that claimed the lives of six people and seriously injured another 18, vented his anger at the atmosphere of intolerance and hate that political discourse and the media are spreading in American life, and in which, it may be assumed, the roots of the criminal’s actions were to be found, after confessing that in his 50 years of service he hadn’t seen anything comparable in its horror. While the victims’ blood was still fresh and Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was fighting for her life in the operating room, the blogosphere embarked on the search for the mastermind behind the horrific, violent behavior and found it in the brutally divisive character of recent political life in America. The most provocative speculated that responsibility could be found in the ideologies of the tea party and even in some of the more incendiary statements from former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin. There hasn’t been a lack of respectable television commentators who have echoed such suppositions either, adding fuel to the fire of Cainism in doing so, which can be imagined given that the political affiliation of Ms. Giffords is ascribed to the Republicans. The fact that she is Jewish contributed in bringing together all the ingredients of the tragedy: a crime motivated by anti-progressive and anti-Semitic hatred. To top it off, Ms. Giffords had directly opposed tough legislation recently passed by her state against illegal immigrants.

The idea that contemporary American life, since Obama came to power, has reached intolerable levels of fratricidal partisanship doesn’t stand up to the slightest historical and comparative analysis. American life, like that of many other political democracies — including, among others, our own — can register high levels of confrontation throughout its history, and in the United States you only need to have followed the last 10 years closely, with both Republicans and Democrats in power, to confirm the assertion: It was the Republicans who stormed the Clinton fortress with the Lewinsky affair, and the Democrats who took their anger out on the second Bush and now the Republicans who are doing it with Obama, as had happened before with Lincoln, Kennedy, Johnson, Truman, both Roosevelts and even at the beginning of the republic’s existence when the Founding Fathers harbored resentments and fueled epic arguments. And there have been assassinations everywhere, which goes without saying. But nobody in their right mind, even deeply regretting the verbal excesses of some, would think of attributing responsibility for masterminding the crime to anyone other than the actual perpetrator of the assassination or to those under whose orders, instructions or payment it was carried out. To maintain otherwise amounts to the acceptance of the thesis of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the African-American pastor of the evangelical church on Chicago’s South Side that Obama and his family used to attend, or that of eminent linguist and outlandish citizen Noam Chomsky when he maintained that the terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York — really, any terrorist attack on the West — had been caused by the victims themselves. The words of the inflammatory pastor still cause a shudder: “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

It’s the Democrats turn now to show remorse, to regret the rhetorical excesses, to imply that therein can be found the root of evil and demand a drastic change of conduct, skirting the delicate border that surrounds and protects freedom of expression so deeply rooted in American democratic life. And it’s foreseeable that in the immediate future, part of passionate public discourse will turn to that sphere. Undoubtedly, with little result, because in the United States and in any other self-respecting democratic society, the exercise is — fortunately — doomed to failure from the get-go. Mere words and thoughts are not criminal, said the classical thinkers, and if there is no direct incitement to the crime, then in the absence of any better guide, it’s best to stick to that principle, regardless of how much things heard about people and institutions in the American media — and in so many other countries’ media, including our own — horrify; and they do horrify. That is the difference between those who with effort live respectfully in democracy and those who, as we have just seen in Pakistan, boast about assassinating a politician who disagreed with the atrocity of a law that punishes blasphemers against Islam by death. Or of those in Nigeria, Iraq and Egypt who, in the name of Islam itself, murder Christians who dare to follow the rituals of their faith.

The story from Arizona was horrific because of the injuries to the congresswoman, but above all horrific because of the indiscriminate nature of the killings, in which children and the elderly died; after all, for a politician, risk is part of the job as some of us know very well (lest this result in corporate condolences). This crime has an indisputable perpetrator who will have to face up to the responsibility of his acts. Now the defense attorney will make sure to argue that his client was not in full possession of his mental faculties. American society, in a state of shock from the events, is in a period of what is expressed very clearly in English as “soul searching,” a heavy-hearted examination of one’s conscience to figure out how and why what happened, happened. It is imperative that they take advantage of the occasion to revive the obvious issue: the pressing need to effectively restrict the arms trade, which, in the confusion of the hours of anguish after the incident, was scarcely mentioned. The ruling of the American Supreme Court a few months ago, based on a peculiar interpretation of what the Constitution says about 18th century “militias” and the possession of arms, and the repealing of existing regulations in several American cities that made their acquisition difficult, was extremely unfortunate. Because, though it’s impossible to ensure an end to crimes involving firearms by controlling or prohibiting them, it’s clear that their possession in the hands of the “enlightened,” like the perpetrator of the Tucson killings, is what, in the end, facilitated this tragedy. When will they learn? And yet, in certain states of the Union, it’s easier to buy a Kalashnikov than to open a bank account.

Javier Rupérez is a Spanish ambassador.