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The Rhetoric of Violence: Sarah Palin's Response to the Tucson Shooting

On January 7, 2011, Arizona Democratic congresswoman Gabrille Giffords sent an email to a friend in Kentucky, Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson. Grayson had recently been offered the prestigious position of director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics and Giffords wrote to congratulate him. “After you get settled,” she wrote, “I would love to talk about what we can do to promote centrism and moderation. I am one of only 12 Dems left in a GOP district (the only woman) and think that we need to figure out how to tone our rhetoric and partisanship down” (Terkel). Giffords’ plans for a civil rhetoric were interrupted when, the next day, at a “Congress on Your Corner” event in Tucson, a vigilante shot her in the head. She survived, but six others died. Tragedy tends to defy precisely what it demands—explanation. Who is Jared Lee Loughner, and why did he do it? Many accounts circulated in the days and weeks following the shooting. Some blamed Arizona’s lax gun laws, others the lack of funding devoted to treating the mentally ill. When Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik stepped up to a podium on January 8 to give a statement on the shooting, he cited these factors. He then took the conversation in a different, and for many, unexpected, direction by blaming political discourse, the very thing Giffords herself feared and hoped to moderate. For him, the angry, polarizing, take-no-prisoners, violent talk of the Republican Right—its “vitriolic rhetoric”—was the primary cause of the shooting. Americans searching for an explanation need look no further than