Last Thursday, Gabrielle Giffords read the First Amendment out loud on the floor of Congress. Two days later, she went to a corner supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, to talk with voters; a nine-year-old girl, Christina-Taylor Green, went there to meet her congresswoman. Jared Lee Loughner went to that supermarket, too. He is now charged with trying to kill Giffords. She is wounded; that little girl, and five more people, are dead. In all, twenty people were shot.
Loughner had lost his mind. Early reports have it that he had also posted on his MySpace page a photograph of a U.S. history textbook with a gun on top of it. In September police had to remove him from a classroom at Pima Community College, after he called the syllabus “unconstitutional” and delivered what his professor called “a rant about the Constitution.” In December he posted on YouTube a statement reading, “The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the United States of America’s Constitution.”
Reading the Constitution, and especially the Second Amendment, is what I happen to have written about in this week’s magazine. I started writing this essay in September, and finished it in December, because I was struck, all fall, by how American political rhetoric had been shifting from a battle over the memory of the Revolution to a contest over the Constitution.
No one knows why Jared Lee Loughner did what he did. Maybe no one will ever know. No one can explain madmen with guns. There’s a corridor at the John F. Kennedy Library where the walls are painted black and where television monitors play, night and day, a single scene: Walter Cronkite announcing Kennedy’s death. He takes his glasses off; he looks at the clock; he puts his glasses back on. He takes them off. He says not a word. And then, he puts his glasses back on.
Read more New Yorker coverage of the Arizona shooting and its aftermath.
