Esquire: The Voices in Jared Loughner's Head Shall Not Be Respected

Political violence in America always has been a matter of great convenience to the people who actually own the country. They don't have to inspire it, or finance it. They can even deplore it. All they really have to do is control the reaction to it — not let it get so wild that it disturbs the stock market and, at the same time, not let the reality of political violence disrupt the anesthetic consensus that swaddles the centers of real power. Thus do we get lone gunmen, and ritualized "healing," and infinite misdirection. Earnest cud-chewing about talk-radio. David Gergen wonders about violence on TV and David Frum talks about marijuana, but nobody asks the old Latin question: Cui bono? Who profits?

There is even a reluctance in the prim and proper precincts of the elite corporate press to call what happened to Gabrielle Giffords an assassination attempt, and to call what Jared Loughner did a political act, because it is not nice to admit how thoroughly ingrained violence has become in our amnesiac American politics, because then we might ask who profits from walking on the fringe.

Loughner didn't open up on the crowd at first. He didn't climb a bell tower or crash his car into a cafeteria. He walked up to the person he most wanted to kill and he shot her in the head. That person was a member of the United States Congress. What Loughner did was an act of madness, surely, but it was a political act of madness, just as were the actions of Guiteau, and Czolgosz, and (maybe) Lee Harvey Oswald.
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The country-club set allied itself for the purpose of gaining and maintaining political power with people whose idea of political violence is slightly more than theoretical, egged on by an exaltation of vicious clowns on the radio and television, and to have heard them all defend the open brandishing of firearms at political rallies last summer was to have heard clearly the warning.

"We don't have guns, but we know people who do."

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/political-violence-in-america-4834173