Showdown Time: Tribune, Deseret News Editorialize on Tucson Shooting
We are printing the editorials written by the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News regarding the shooting in Tucson that killed six people and wounded numerous others, including U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Read them both and decide which one is the best. Our remarks on the two editorials are printed below the Deseret News editorial.
The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial
Hearing Voices
Published: January 11, 2011 01:01AM
Those who act out of madness, we hear, hear voices. Disembodied voices that command them to do things. Strange things. Awful things.
But when the insane act, we don’t blame the voices. Not the ones in their head. Not the ones on talk radio.
We may spare a harsh thought for a society that makes it too easy to carry assault weapons, too difficult to receive treatment for obvious emotional illnesses, too common to use the language of war and mayhem when discussing matters of mere politics And it is proper now to wonder what, if anything, we have collectively done to create a culture where the emotionally vulnerable are pushed over a violent edge.
Everything we know so far suggests that the man charged with opening fire Saturday at a Tucson shopping center, killing six and critically wounding the local member of Congress, is a very disturbed young man who acted on his own, for reasons of his own, reasons that may never make sense.
But we do not like to believe that one unhinged person has the power to create such suffering all by himself (see: Kennedy assassination, conspiracy theories). So we look for other factors to blame. Sadly, they are not hard to find.
The elected official who was apparently the main target of this atrocity, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, had already been the subject of many violent images, statements and gestures. Her Republican rival in the last election sponsored an event in which those who opposed Giffords’ politics could assemble to fire automatic weapons in the air. After her vote in favor of the health care reform act, her Tucson office was vandalized. And her district was one of those that had a rifle-style crosshairs stuck on it by Sarah Palin’s political action committee, at about the time that Palin herself was favoring her Twitter followers with such profundities as “Don’t retreat. Reload.”
The violent metaphors, of course, are not limited to political activists of the right. Or of the left. Even non-partisan observers talk of political “ground assaults” or “sustained air campaigns” when all they really mean is door-to-door campaigning or TV ads.
Clearly, Arizona’s weapons laws are too lax and its mental health safety net missed one. We would all be happier today if either had prevented a person with a demonstrated history of emotional illness from purchasing a semi-automatic weapon that could fire more than 30 rounds without reloading.
Those who bring violent, hateful images into the political arena should not be banned, sued or held criminally liable. In the spirit of the First Amendment, they should be heard, evaluated for what they are, and dismissed as unworthy of our attention or any positions of leadership.
The Deseret News Editorial
Tucson shootings: A senseless tragedy
Published: Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011 12:00 a.m. MST
The mass murder in Tucson on Saturday that killed six people and badly injured Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has left the nation in a state of sadness, shock and horror. It ought to be apparent that this is not a time to score political points or to drive home an ideological concept. Murder has no justification. It is no argument for a cause.
No campaign can be won with the deaths of such people as 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, born Sept. 11, 2001; a bright young girl full of hopes and dreams. Political platforms aren’t built by gunning down three people who were in a supermarket by happenstance, or by killing one of the congresswoman’s staff members and a federal judge.
Unfortunately, American history is littered with similar senseless acts — many perpetrated by deranged minds who thought they were furthering one cause or another. But such tragedies do not, by any stretch of logic, define Americans.
Instead, this is a nation defined by its reaction to such outrages, and that reaction tends toward compassion, love and prayers of concern for the wounded and survivors of the dead. It is typified by the bipartisan expressions of grief in Congress and elsewhere.
Regardless of the shooter’s motives, attacks such as these end up striking more than just the individuals or politicians involved. They are frontal assaults on all Americans and on freedoms ranging from the right to association to representative government, itself. Giffords was shot while holding a public event in her district. Elected officials belong and are accountable to the people, and she was making herself available to the people in the most direct way possible.
If politicians react to this tragedy by building further barriers between themselves and the people, that would be a further tragedy. It would, unfortunately, be continuing a trend. A long string of such public outrages has succeeded through the years in making the people’s leaders less accessible. Presidents of the United States once walked freely through Washington and accepted visitors who knocked on the door. But four assassinations and other assassination attempts forced them to retreat. A gunman’s random shots at the White House more than a decade ago led the government to close Pennsylvania Avenue outside that building to all but foot traffic.
Naturally, the nation must find ways to protect the people who run it. But each such retreat from the public is bad for its democratic spirit.
The world may never fully understand why Jared Lee Loughner, the man charged in these killings, allegedly did what he did — any more than it understands John Hinckley Jr., Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth. The local sheriff described Loughner as a troubled person.
Such people don’t lead public opinion on political issues. Their vicious acts are not statements of any kind. They are senseless tragedies, and should be mourned as such.
© 2011 Deseret News Publishing Company | All rights reserved
Watts Cookin’ Comments
Watts Cookin thinks the Tribune editorial is far superior to the Deseret News take on the situation and it begins with the headline.
The Deseret News titled its editorial, ‘A Senseless Tragedy’ and then proceeded to write a senseless editorial, offering nothing of value except to mourn.
The Tribune titled its editorial “Hearing Voices” which was an ingenious title encapsulating the tragedy perfectly inferring both to voices in the heads of the insane, and the shrill voices on talk radio.
The Tribune does not place the blame for the shrill voices on talk radio on either the left or right, and does not propose that anything be done about to restrict those First Amendment rights, but concludes appropriately and emphatically that those voices are unworthy of our attention and certainly unworthy of any positions of leadership in our society.
The Deseret News, a big supporter of the new campaign for civility in public discourse, blew this opportunity to promote civility and instead defended the rantings of the talking heads that are a legitimate issue in this matter and should be front and center in public discussions.
Also, the Deseret News missed the opportunity to discuss other important issues that arise from this tragedy that were mentioned by the Tribune, namely (1) gun laws, and (2) how we treat the mentally ill. Our liberal gun laws have nearly returned us to the days of the Wild West, and our Congressman Jason Chaffetz is yearning to be the next Wyatt Earp.
The Deseret News, although almost always careful in its own language and civil in its dialogue, couldn’t help coming to the rescue of the loudmouths who compose the base of the Republican Party and who have lowered the bar on civil discourse by raising the decibel of their rhetoric. The right wing radicals of the Utah Legislature have a history of outrageous language and the Deseret News should be calling them on it every time it happens.
We’ve got trouble and it is senseless to ignore it.