Who can we thank for this? The GOP and the National Rifle Association. That’s right.

The Assault Weapons Ban signed into law by President Clinton in 1994 banned 19 types of semi-automatic military-style guns and ammunition clips with more than 10 rounds. The bill expired back in 2004. If the ban were still in effect, it’s less likely that Jared Lee Loughner could have obtained a gun with a high-capacity magazine. Stores could legally only sell used high-capacity magazines at that time, and new magazines could not be manufactured.

But this issue goes beyond weapons ban. Here in the US, guns and violence is as American as apple pie. For your entertainment, from Bowling for Columbine, “A Brief History of the United States of America.”

I Loves My Gun

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rep. Giffords was shot through the head at close range and is still in critical condition. Dr. Peter Rhee, medical director of the hospital’s trauma and critical care unit, said Saturday that she had been shot once in the head, “through and through,” with the bullet going through her brain.

Six of the victims died, among them John M. Roll, the chief judge for the United States District Court for Arizona, and a 9-year-old girl, Christina Taylor-Green. Christina, recently elected to her school’s student council, was born on Sept. 11, 2001. In addition to Christina and Judge Roll, those killed included Gabe Zimmerman, a former social worker who served as Giffords’ director of community outreach. Also killed were 76-year-old Dorthy Murray, 76-year-old Dorwin Stoddard, and 79-year-old Phyllis Scheck.

The shooter is identified as 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner was arrested at the scene after being detained by bystanders. He is being quested by the FBI, who have said he was the only shooter. The weapon used was reported to be a 9mm Glock model 19 pistol with a 30 round magazine. Loughner purchased his semi-automatic pistol legally in Tucson.

President Barack Obama called the shooting an “unspeakable tragedy,” adding that “such a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society.” Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, another Democrat from the Tucson area, was “sickened by the horrific attack” and called the shooting a tragedy for “Arizona, our nation, and our democracy.” Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said, “My thoughts and prayers are with Congresswoman Giffords and her family, the Congresswoman’s staff and their families, as well as the other victims of this senseless and cruel violence.”

Various senior Republican politicians have expressed their concern for the physical well-being of Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims, and that concern is no doubt sincere. Sarah Palin expressed her “sincere condolences” to Giffords’ family and to the other victims, John McCain is “horrified” by the attack, and House Speaker John Boehner said that “Our prayers are with congresswoman Giffords, her staff, all who were injured and their families.”

Cult of Personality
These is no denying throughout history there are many examples of deranged loners and violent people attacking politicians, what has changed recently is that politicians are actually encouraging a climate of suspicion and division. It is hard to argue that political debate in this country has not only become dangerous, but a cesspit of venomous innuendo and lies.

The tragedy in Arizona is not uniquely the fault of the Republican Party or the Tea Party or right wing American politics in general. While they share the blame as a whole. It’s impossible to know what motivated Loughner, but it is not hard figure out what inspired him. The question of right wing rhetoric and its effects cannot be ignored as if it doesn’t exist, because it does, and they all know it.

What happened in Arizona is evidence that Republican politics have gone overboard in their rhetoric, as Sarah Palin and the leaders of Tea Party movement swung into damage-control. But this does not absolve them for taking part in creating the hyper-vicious climate that have provoked unbalanced nut-cases to attack others, under the guise of striking back and taking back the country.

A cult of personality arises when a country’s leader uses mass media to create an idealized and heroic public image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. While the cult of personality generally applies to leaders in in a totalitarian nation, it stands to reason that it is also asserted in everyday situations to advocate conformity to philosophies and lifestyles, by way of herd mentality.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik expressed his concern of the current political climate. Dupnik said that “when the rhetoric about hatred … about mistrust of government” gets heated, it inflames “the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Giffords, a moderate Democrat, expressed similar concern before the shooting. Last March, shortly after the House passed health care legislation, Giffords’ congressional office in Tucson was vandalized. Afterward, she warned of the dangers of the animosity against her by conservatives. She was referring to the use of cross-hairs to highlight the vulnerability of her site on Sarah Palin’s controversial Facebook “Hit List” in the November midterm elections.

She said: “We’re on Sarah Palin’s ‘targeted’ list, but the thing is that the way she has it depicted, we’re in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realise that there are consequences to that action.”

had been threatened in the recent past as had John Rolls and his family, who eventually ended up being protected by the U.S. Marshall’s Service for a month in 2009. Dupnik also noted a political event at which an audience member dropped a weapon. During another incident, windows in her office were broken shortly after her vote for health care reform in March, and authorities are currently investigating a suspicious package found Saturday at Giffords’ Tucson office.

Apart from her cross-hairs campaign, she also made news with the remark, “Don’t retreat, Instead RELOAD.”

Palin hasn’t directly commented on whether she thinks there were consequences to her actions, however, this hasn’t stopped from scrubbing the images from her website and her Facebook page targeting Gabriel Giffords and others with the cross-hairs of a gun sight.

No one can argue that Sarah Palin has grown in popularity, to the point she is seen as a pseudo-Biblical figure sent from Above. The truth is, Palin is adored by many because many of them see themselves also taking down the so-called elitists. They stand by her side with an almost unbelievable vigor because, in essence, they are dealing a passive-aggressive blow to those who have frequently criticized their lifestyles over the years.

Palin’s rise is not social phenomena but a manifestation of our credo of rugged individualism. It is this credo that clouds person’s into believing public action as an expression of individual psyche. Jared Lee Loughner may have acted alone and is certainly disturb, but the “political themes of his instability” can be found among the far Right.

There are many other documented incidents carried out by people with mental issues like Jared Loughner, which they are directly involved either with Republican politicians or their supporters at their rallies or in the media. This is not an anti-Republican screed, these are facts and they are representative of the current Republican Party and its links to the Tea Party and right wing voters in general. The Republican Party has done absolutely nothing to put a stop to this kind of intimidation based upon the threat of violence because it needs the votes.

Twenty years before this happened, the funk metal band “Living Colour” prophesied this happening with their hit “Cult of Personality.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

This has been coming for a long time. With all the hate-speech, race-bating, homophobic, immigrant-bashing, and blatant lies that goes unchallenged over the airwaves everyday, it’s a miracle this doesn’t occur everyday

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source: Ain’t It Cool News

In my 29-year career as a police officer and detective with the Madison Police Department, in Madison, Wisconsin, I have witnessed and experienced many instances of hatred, violence and racism. In most cases, those negative things were not initiated by law enforcement; sometimes, unfortunately, they were. The 95% of us who sincerely strive to “serve and protect” are tarnished by the 5% of us who intentionally “disserve and destroy.” Nowhere is this more apparent in current American law enforcement than in Maricopa County, Arizona, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio has taken the law into his own hands, at the expense of the Constitution, professional ethics, and proper police conduct. Earlier this year, the mayor of Phoenix wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney general’s office, asking the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate Arpaio’s aggressive illegal immigration crackdowns. Mayor Phil Brown wrote that Arpaio’s sweeps show “a pattern and practice of conduct that includes discriminatory harassment, improper stops, searches and arrests.”

Using local law enforcement to enforce Federal immigration laws, as Sheriff Arpaio is doing, weakens the very community links local police and sheriffs’ departments work so hard daily to maintain and build upon. Having community members who are afraid of local police should not be the goal of a department; instead, a far more wide-reaching and positive effect is gained by police-community trust, interaction and collaboration. This might sound too much like social work to Sheriff Arpaio, whose top-down, dictatorial methods favor humiliation, degradation, prisoner abuse, racial profiling, terrorizing Latino residents, and cavorting with local neo-Nazi groups. And according to a 2008 policy report on effective law enforcement by the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian-leaning watchdog group based in Phoenix, Sheriff Arpaio’s department “falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission.” The report found that Maricopa County has “diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration.”

Continue article at Imagine 2050

Here is the background from blogamigo, Manny:

Isabel is one of the major driving forces behind the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, headquartered in Tucson, and that’s just when she’s wearing her organizer hat. She also serves as one of Pima County’s leading Legal Defenders, which has Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s pink underwear in a snit since apparently the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America does not apply to those who serve in government.

You see, Sheriff Joe came to town recently to sign copies of his new book that blames all the ills of society on “illegals”. Well, that type of thing isn’t received the same way in Tucson as it is north of the Gila, so a protest was organized in conjunction with Sheriff Joe’s appearance. A piñata created in Arpaio’s likeness, wearing his trademark pink boxers, was…well, it was a piñata, so you can imagine.

In response to the whole thing, Arpaio and his friends in the racist right’s media empire took to the airwaves in the ironically named radio station 104.1 The Truth in an effort to get Isabel fired from Pima County. The station’s radio personalities spend a majority of their time and advertising money on equating undocumented workers with terrorists, drug dealers, disease carriers, and invaders of the Homeland™ – pretty standard fare for a radio channel that also features Bill “Falafel” O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, etc etc etc.

Normally I would be mad, but something inside me can no longer tolerate the pain that I get every time I report on the cruelty that has engulf this nation with xenophobia and nativism.

Following the June 25, immigration raid at Action Rags here in Houston, TX, my life is much different. The following week, I was in a meeting with the families of the raid. It was so heart breaking, to this day, I just cannot complete my post without shedding at tear.

Hearing the personal accounts is much different than hearing or reading about it. Sure, a blog post or a news article can tug at your heart strings, Lord knows I have done my best to it, but nothing beats the emotional impact when one personally hears their stories. I understand the frustration Marisa Treviño, of Latina Lista, expressed in a recent article in Rio Grande Guardian. While the current immigration is not so “uplifting,” there are people who do have the “luxury” to “drop thinking about immigration.” I can’t.

In a recent New York Times article, Father Ouderkirk quotes Sister Mary as saying: “Once you’ve cried for two straight weeks, you don’t have any more tears. But it doesn’t mean you stopped feeling.”

This is where I am at, I am still grieving for these families who have been divided, individuals uprooted from their homes, and communities that are destroyed. I can’t even look at the notes that I took that day without crying. While it is easy for Justice to feel excited at the deportation, the question is how can anybody cheer at the cruelty that these people faced at the hands of ICE throughout the US. How can anyone not shed a single tear when they hear these traumatic stories:

- they were not allowed to close the door whenever someone needed to use the restroom
- sexual harassment. women being touched in private areas in from of the men
- been told if they did not go through the voluntary deportation, the proceeding could take over a year, which would mean they are not allowed to work.
- no water was granted to them. One said when they asked for water, ICE dumped the water on the floor, saying “There is no water for you.”
- one woman fainted because she was thirsty and still no water was given to them
- before they were interviewed, they remained in a hot van with no running a/c for over an hour forced to share among 10-13 detainees one bottle water.
- when given something to drink, it was one of those frozen concentrated drink that was still unthawed.

While I share my rage and frustration with those who are justifiably so at Jon Justice, but at this point and its at this time, I don’t have the emotional energy to do it all over again.

No matter how carefully orchestrated, deportation dehumanizes people who come to this country to work hard to produce the many luxuries to which many like Jon Justice and Sheriff Joe Arpaio have grown accustomed – clean offices and classrooms, the food that is prepared for them at the restaurants they frequent, the food that is ready to buy at their local grocery stores, the homes they live in, and keeping this nation safe by serving the military.

This who blogged about this travesty:
Latino Politico
Citizen Orange
The Unapologetic Mexican
American Humanity
Zuky
Feathered Bastard (Phoenix New Times)
Alternet (call to action sent to their email list)
VivirLatino
Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion
WOC PhD
The Mahatma X Files
La Chola
Off Our Pedestals
Questioning Transphobia
Chicks Dig Me
The Strangest Alchemy