Arizona gun laws come under scrutiny
By Matthew Garrahan in Tucson, Arizona
Published: January 9 2011 20:43 | Last updated: January 10 2011 02:46
Emergency personnel outside the shopping centre in Tucson attend to one of the wounded victims of the shooting
On the suburban street in northern Tucson where Jared Lee Loughner lived with his parents, neighbours spoke of a loner often spotted sitting on his porch smoking while his father tinkered with a Chevrolet Camaro.
“Since getting out of high school he has become kind of disillusioned with life and having to take on responsibility,” Roger Whithed, who lives a few doors from Mr Loughner, told the Financial Times. “You’d see him walking around and think: that’s not someone I really want to know. He always looked a little rough around the edges.”
It is still unclear what motivated the weekend shooting spree of which Mr Loughner is accused, which left six people dead and Gabrielle Giffords, the Democratic congresswoman, in critical condition.
The messages placed in front of Gabrielle Giffords’ office in Tucson left no doubt about where the blame lay. “Hate speech = murder,” was the message on more than one sign, a reference to the increasingly fiery rhetoric that has become a central part of American political discourse.
“People can be weak-minded, and if they have no direction, they can be easily persuaded,” said Michelle Bicknell, who was lighting a candle in the vigil outside the office. Ms Giffords, she said, “is very popular in Tucson ... We’re all praying for her”.
Arizona’s gun laws are coming under scrutiny following the shooting, after it emerged Mr Loughner had attracted the attention of the police in the years before the shooting. He was arrested in 2007 for possessing drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanour charge. He also posted rambling YouTube videos in which he was critical of the US government. But he was still able to buy a semi-automatic 9mm gun legally in Tucson, following a background check.
Arizona recently passed a contentious law allowing gun owners over the age of 21 to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. Although the US government continues to oversee the background-check programme which is required to purchase a weapon, Arizona passed another law last year exempting from federal regulation weapons that are made and kept in the state.
But in a state where the right to bear arms is cherished, there was little sign of a push for more gun-control legislation. “I’m an avid gun owner – I got my first one when I was eight years old,” said Ryan Collins, who works at a restaurant near the Tucson university campus. Mr Collins told the Financial Times he had four guns and supported the state’s gun laws. “I wish there was a way to prevent attacks like this from happening, but if someone wants to do it, they’re going to find a way of doing it,” he said.
Tucson has a large student population and is considered relatively liberal in a state known for its Republican leanings.
Still, Ms Gifford had been threatened before the shooting. Her office in Tucson was vandalised last year after she voted to support Barack Obama’s healthcare reform bill; police were also called when a gun was dropped at a congressional town hall meeting in Tucson in 2009 to debate the healthcare bill.
Guns loomed large in November’s election, when Ms Gifford won re-election to her Tucson district following a tightly fought contest with Jesse Kelly, a candidate from the Tea Party anti-tax movement of low tax and small government activists.
Mr Kelly, an former marine whose campaign was endorsed by Ms Palin, former Republican vice-presidential candidate, hosted campaign events where guns were present. “Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly,” was how one event was promoted.
There was little sign of Tea Party activists toning down their rhetoric in the aftermath of the attacks. “Any time you start suppressing freedom of speech, I think it’s wrong,” Allyson Miller, a founder of the 500-member Pima county Tea Party Patriots told the Talking Points Memo website. As Arizona comes under the spotlight again after a year in which the state’s new immigration controls provoked widespread national criticism, debate about its polarised political climate – and the ease with which an apparently dysfunctional loner was able to purchase a firearm – looks set to intensify.
An exasperated Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County and a friend of Ms Giffords, assailed the state’s lax gun laws on Sunday. “We’re the tombstone of the US ... I have never been a proponent of letting everybody in this state carry weapons whenever they want and that’s almost where we are.”
