The situation kept moving so the opportunity to reply to this last night wasn't really there. So I'll do it now, even though it's not massively relevant to recent developments.
The trouble is, it's a reasonable conclusion to leap to (for various reasons) even if it may well be wrong. Violent political language often leads to political violence, though, of course, we don't know whether that was the case here.
That is pure nonsense, whose logical conclusion would lead to a ban on political speech lest someone get hurt. The only conclusion that is reasonable to leap to is no conclusion at all until all the facts are known. The shooter could have any motivation or no motivation at all.No, that is absolutely
not the logical conclusion of such concerns. The logical conclusion would be to avoid using violent (a few posts on the term switched to 'hateful'; I would argue that there's an important distinction, actually) language against political opponents, something that is (happily) not hard to do.
Of course the situation has moved on and we now know more about the person that did this (who appears to be a standard issue anti-system lunatic) so making assertions relating to the more extreme rhetoric associated with the 'Tea Party' is
not reasonable or particularly fair, at least based on the information that we have at the moment. But as an immediate reaction, before anything was known about the killer?
But, again, the situation has moved on now. This was political - any attempt to kill a politician at a public event is political - but it's the politics of the fetid darkness beyond the fringes, and not of large political movements (whatever we might personally think of them).
I just wanted to clear that up, or at least try to.
