BY TOM ZOELLNER
CHAPMAN
first person
Who Shot Gabrielle Giffords?
D
O COMMUNITIES UNDER STRESS CREATE THEIR OWN RANDOM BURSTS OF VIOLENCE, IN THE SAME WAY THAT MOUNTAINTOPS CREATE THEIR
OWN THUNDERSTORMS OUT OF HIGH-FLOWING AIR CURRENTS?
T
Former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly.
he question has long intrigued social scientists. The criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling advanced the famous “broken windows” theory in 1982, postulating that the breaking of a single window in an abandoned building encourages the rapid breaking of all the windows because a certain cosmic permission has been given for vandalism. The question of how geography shapes the psyche is worth examining a year after the Jan. 8, 2011, Safeway shootings in Tucson, Ariz. 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. Much has been made of the website put up by Sarah Palin’s political action committee (with target markets over the districts of vulnerable Democrats, including Gabrielle’s) and the newspaper ad for her opponent calling on his supporters to help him shoot an M-16 at a fundraiser. I think these gestures are unimportant
in themselves — in dubious taste but certainly not the motivating reason why the paranoid schizophrenic Jared Loughner brought a gun to the Safeway with the intention of assassinating Gabrielle. 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. This is the environment in which the punitive and ridiculous law SB 1070 was passed, requiring local police to demand the immigration papers of anybody they stop who appears to fit a suspicious profile — such as a Latino who happened to dress down that day. 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. The slime was directed at her personally, but it was only a convenient channel for the fear that the American dream was lost and that a crisis was at hand. Studies of schizophrenics have revealed that their hallucinations are shaped and even governed by the culture that surrounds them. What Loughner saw of public life in Tucson was one of general fear and outrage, with one solitary woman, her face in constant media view in sinister cast, being branded as the responsible party for all the misery. Small windows were being cracked that year in Tucson. Permissions were being unwittingly given. Gabrielle’s office window was broken out by a pellet pistol in March after a series of angry “town hall” meetings on the healthcare bill. Gabrielle confessed to her husband that she feared somebody would bring a gun to a public event and shoot her. Tucson was abruptly sobered by the bloodshed at the Safeway. Flowers and cards were showered on the lawn outside the hospital where Gabrielle lay. The mourning over this chilling, pointless act brought the city together in a way that would have been unfathomable in the ugly days of the 2010 congressional election. It was almost as if, deep down, we remembered we share a destiny with each other. And we all wondered quietly if we could have somehow done more to prevent our civic air currents from massing into thunderclouds.
Tom Zoellner is an associate professor of English at Chapman University and the author of A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America. A version of this article originally appeared in the online magazine Zócalo Public Square.
SPRING 2012
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