What Obama's Tucson speech overlooked

Why, to put it crudely, was this particular shooting so special?

Guns kill 30,000 Americans every year. In 1995, in Oklahoma City, 168 federal workers and their fellow citizens were blown sky-high by Timothy McVeigh. Three years ago, a deranged student, Seung-Hui Cho, shot and killed 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech. By these numbers, the six slain and 13 wounded in Tucson on January 8 merited a one- or two day news cycle.

After all, does anyone remember Steven Kazmierczak, the Northern Illinois University student who perpetrated his own St. Valentine's Day massacre in 2008 when he opened fire in a lecture hall, killing five and wounding 18? Those numbers are about the same as the casualties in Tucson. Yet Kazmierczak's mad spree touched off no national debate, nor did it bring a certain Illinois politician who was running for president back to his home state to make a big speech about it.

The answer is partly, of course, that one of the shooting victims was a Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, and the occasion was a political meet-and-greet at a shopping mall. An attack on a public servant in the process of meeting with her constituents seems like an attack on the body politic itself. The fact that one of the victims, the granddaughter of a famous Philadelphia sports figure, was born on 9/11, and that another was a veteran of the Kent State massacre in 1970, gave the incident a vividly emblematic character.

Palin's "'crosshairs'

But these details came out only later— and, given the level of violence in this country, such coincidences are perhaps less surprising than we might think. The anguished response to Tucson thus remains puzzling to some degree.

Still, we should welcome a teachable moment, as President Obama likes to call the events— usually disasters— that bring us to a common focus. But what lesson did he want us to draw from the murderous act of a patent psychotic?

The most natural one, certainly, is that where guns and nuts are easily united, mayhem predictably results. But that was precisely the one lesson Obama never mentioned in his lengthy Tucson address. Instead, he spoke on his favorite topic: civility in public discourse.

Now, no one can deny that the Republic could use a healthy dollop of such discussion. Sarah Palin put Congresswoman Giffords's district in pictorial crosshairs in "targeting" certain seats in the November elections (Giffords is a Democrat). Similar incitations to violence, some more direct, have been heard across Tea Partyland.

Such rhetoric, though, is hardly a recent phenomenon. The Republicans, running Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, characterized the previous Democratic administrations of Roosevelt and Truman as "20 years of treason." And what is the appropriate punishment for traitors?

One answer to every question

President Obama's own response to almost any event is to plead for a more civil tone in conversation— a willful substitution of form for content. The first time, it was refreshing; the tenth, it was vacuous; by now, it's inane, or even vaguely sinister. Like the guy in the TV ad who keeps repeating, "I pick things up and I put them down," Obama seems to have only one answer to every question.

In this case, I would submit, it's the supremely wrong answer. People aren't being killed in random bunches because politicians lack courtesy and mutual respect. They're being killed because we refuse to regulate guns. They will continue to be killed because Congress and the President himself refuse to confront this issue.

When Obama responds to something like the Tucson shooting spree with more bromides about being nice to each other, it is he who actually gives the green light to more violence. If all we had to do to solve the nation's problems was to just get along, we could have simply elected Rodney King.

Memorial, or political rally?

Another disturbing element to the President's Tucson speech was its festive air. It took place not in a church or some other solemn setting, but in an entertainment arena. Obama was preceded by the playing of Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, which has become a semi-official public anthem, and the speech itself was interrupted by raucous bursts of applause, much as if it were for a political rally. You might have thought that people had come to celebrate rather than to mourn.

In the film Nashville, too, Robert Altman caught this note of grotesque self-congratulation in the midst of tragedy, as if our massacres— almost ritual in their frequency and similarity—somehow constituted an affirmation of our national life rather than an assault on it.

To bring the event full circle, it was reported that Congresswoman Gifford was herself the proud and proficient owner of the same type of Glock gun that put a bullet through her head. Well, that's Arizona, where— to recall another film of the '70s— Charles Bronson bought the weapons that made him the avenging urban vigilante of Death Wish. But we are all the Wild West now.♦


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