Tom Zoellner, a Tucson native who worked closely with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, has written a new book about the shooting in Tucson last year that took the lives of several people and left Giffords greatly injured. In an op-ed promoting the book, Zoellner wrote that the political and cultural climate in Tucson motivated the killer, Jared Lee Loughner:
The question of how geography shapes the psyche is worth examining again as the anniversary of the January 8, 2011 Safeway shootings in Tucson, Arizona, draws closer. The months leading up to the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords were unusually paranoid ones. I saw the tension up close, because Tucson is my hometown, and I worked on my friend Gabrielle’s campaign as a speechwriter, watching as her face was all over television and outdoor ads portraying her as the embodiment of a government that was wrecking the local economy. There was a feeling in Tucson that I did not recognize. …
What they were, though, were symptoms of the larger causes of Tucson’s unease: a fragile economy, a fear of illegal immigrants, a toxic political culture that favors passion over reason, and the disconnected neighborhoods of newcomers where loneliness festers and lack of concern for one’s neighbor becomes a habit. …
Loughner was suffering from a grave mental illness, but he was not living in a world made entirely of his own delusions. He could still hear and see what surrounded him, and those surroundings helped him formulate a plot against a specific target: Gabrielle Giffords…
This assessment drew criticism from Matt Welch, Editor in Chief of Reason:
One of many problems with this line of argument is that you can, at any given point, always find larger indices of “unease,” toxic political debates, and “disconnected neighborhoods of newcomers.” I am trying to imagine any period of American history where those descriptions would not apply. So do we pin partial blame for the L.A. arsonist on our maddening immigration process? Do we blame every crime at or near an Occupy encampment on overheated anti-capitalist rhetoric? No, we (and here I mean most of us, as opposed to commentators who have become debased by partisanship) do not.
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