The President will speak sometime during the “Together We Thrive” event happening at the McKale Center on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, four days after the assassination attempt that wounded 15 people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), and killed 6 others, including a Giffords staffer, a federal judge and four constituents. It is expected that he will speak for 20 minutes and focus mainly on the victims themselves

I don’t really care that Boehner won’t support the King bill, which I find pretty ridiculous. But if legislation that comes from the Republican side can’t even get past the introductory stage, I don’t see what hope there is for Democratic bills.

It turned out that Zamudio actually pushed the holder of the gun into a wall, and thus came much closer to doing violence on an innocent man who had just taken the gun from Jared Loughner than even this description suggests. The potential for yet another innocent death was pretty high here. And a Wild West show with alternating bouts of gunfire seems like an extremely dangerous environment for bystanders.

Frank Lautenberg said it very clearly on MSNBC: the difference between this country and practically every other industrialized nation, which has a tiny fraction of the gun violence as we have in the US, is that “we don’t have more madmen, we have more guns.” And increasing the amount of armed people out there won’t help this ratio, either.

Right now, the public isn’t ready to believe an argument that Jared Loughner was motivated by right-wing rhetoric. Fortunately, nobody has said that, because it’s the wrong claim to make. Nobody has claimed that crosshairs on a map or talk of “Second Amendment remedies” is specifically to blame (some on the right have blamed heavy metal music and a skull in his backyard, and that’s just as silly). The main claim is that the toxic stew of noxious rhetoric, particularly in Loughner’s home district and home state of Arizona, creates an environment that amps up a lunatic fringe. Loughner couldn’t help but trip over that, and indeed his writings do have a cockeyed resonance to some of the really far-right groups like Posse Comitatus and the Patriot movement. That doesn’t make those practitioners of angry rhetoric culpable, but it sure doesn’t mean what they’re doing helped, either.

Rep. Chellie Pingree is absolutely right, and it would be worth it to back her up on this. I’m sure Republicans will try to laugh it off, but if everyone’s calling for civility and a change in how we conduct politics, it seems to me accusing the opponent of “killing” anything as a metaphor in legislation is a good place to start.

There have been a lot of attempts at false equivalencies (the last Republican Vice Presidential candidate of the United States is exactly the same as a random Daily Kos diarist) and a lot of attempts to explain away incendiary political rhetoric with a wave of the hand and something like “both sides do it.” But the responses above on their own refute this. They resort to the pretty common rhetoric of demonization to make their points. I have no interest in censoring their speech, but I sure want to highlight it.

Whether Loughner was merely a deranged kid who would latch onto whatever philosophy he could find, or whether he actively sought out far-right conspiracy theories, I don’t think you can deny the general milieu of anti-government rhetoric that just so happened to nestle in the very state where Loughner lived.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, who lost her husband to gun violence before coming to Congress, and who has since become one of the leading pro-gun control politicians in the country, plans to introduce legislation in response to the shooting in Tuscon, Arizona that claimed the life of six and left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in a medically induced coma.

Thank you so much for all you’ve done to create motive and opportunity for this endless rolling tragedy of violence against liberals and Democrats. But why do you refuse to take any credit for your achievement?

What we know is that Jared Loughner, who was rejected from the military and kicked out of a community college, and who had various minor run-ins with the law, was able to purchase a semi-automatic 9MM Glock with an extended magazine.