Although the current focus seems to be on the tone of the political discourse in the wake of the Tucson shooting, is there something else worthy of attention in our society that may have been behind Saturday’s tragedy?
On Tuesday’s “Imus in the Morning” program on the Fox Business Network, ABC’s Jake Tapper opined that there was once a time when people like Jared Loughner, the suspect in the shooting of Ariz. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, would have been locked up and not on the street. But he explained that was changed by an active civil libertarian movement.
“One thing that an older family member of mine said to me, as I mentioned earlier to you, is it used to be a lot easier to get people like this locked up,” Tapper said. “And then civil libertarians got active and became much more difficult to do so. I’m talking decades ago and that’s something that I want to read more about and learn more about, because that does sound interesting.”
Tapper argued that in the very least society needed to find a way to keep people like Loughner from owning a lethal weapon.
“I mean if this guy was literally terrifying his classmates at the community college, they thought, they described him as a serial killer, they thought he was unhinged, he was asked to not come back – that seems to me that society needs to figure out a way, to A – prevent people like that from getting lethal weapons, and B – maybe even go so far as to remove them from the street. That is a subject for debate, just as legitimately as the political rhetoric we hear.”
Watch: