Another lethal April, another failure to ask why.

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The Cruelest Month
Another lethal April, another failure to ask why.
By Dahlia LithwickPosted Wednesday, April 15, 2009, at 6:33 PM ET

April is the wing-nuttiest month—the month that draws out the paranoid, the delusional, and the copycats who revere them. Next week we will commemorate the 16th anniversary of the Waco standoff (76 dead); the 14th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing (168 dead); and the 10th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine (13 dead). Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre (32 dead). Each of these events connects to the next in a deliberate chain of attention-craving and terror. And binding them all together is the slew of smaller copycat killings we've nearly forgotten: in Taber, Canada (1 dead); in Santee, Calif. (2 dead); at the Red Lake Chippewa Reservation in Minnesota (10 dead); and in Montreal, Quebec (1 dead).


This April has already proven one of the most lethal in recent memory: It includes the slaughter by Jiverly Wong of 13 at a community center in Binghamton, N.Y., on April 3 and Richard Poplawski's cold-blooded murder of three Pittsburgh police officers on April 4. (Both were wearing body armor and described as "pseudo commandos"—seeking out a showdown with the police.) In Washington state, also on April 4, a father killed his five children, some in their beds. Two more killings in Charlotte. N.C., over Easter weekend. And we haven't yet hit the middle of the month—the 19th, 20th and, 21st—when deranged dreams of immortality tend to come into full blossom.


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Lucky for the NRA, many other Americans believe these "facts," too. They are getting them straight from Glenn Beck, who was frothing in March about an Obama conspiracy to take guns away, and from Andrew Napolitano, who hosted a Fox News segment featuring Alex Jones "exposing" the New World Order and Obama's "agenda" for gun confiscation. As Eric Boehlert pointed out in this smart piece connecting the incitement to the violence, "what Fox News is now programming on a daily (unhinged) basis is unprecedented in the history of American television." A national news show regularly accuses the president of socialism, fascism, Marxism, and the desire to destroy America.

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The right wing has lost its mind today over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security warning of a surge in "rightwing extremist activity" and a danger of increased militia activity. As Glenn Greenwald notes, it's a little late for their tears on the privacy front. But as the far right worries that the president's storm troopers might trample their petunia beds, it's silent on the question of whether a nation full of disaffected, frightened, and rage-filled citizens should be packing heat.

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The extreme hysteria that surrounds discussions of gun control leads to absurd arguments about causation. Nobody claims that Glenn Beck is responsible for killing people. Nobody thinks guns are inherently evil. But how can there be an honest national debate over gun violence if we cannot even acknowledge the connections between people who admonish us to become "armed and dangerous" and a citizen's decision to arm himself and kill? Our annual April shooting sprees have many complicated causes, and no single factor is fully to blame. But it's willful blindness to fail to see any connections between the rising number of guns in America, the decline in gun regulation, and the screaming nightly predictions about the rise of an apocalyptic totalitarian police state. Until we can recognize that these connections exist, there will be more killings in the coming weeks and years. You bring the candles. I'll bring the teddy bears.
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that date always makes me nervous. Add that to today's two minute hate and see what happens.