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Less than 48 hours later, Giffords was lying in hospital after being shot through the head at her local constituent meeting and America paused for a moment of silence to acknowledge the six people killed by Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged 22-year-old shooter.
Loughner's victims were a federal judge John Roll, 63; Dorothy Morris, a 76-year-old “staunch Republican”; Phyllis Schenck, 79; Dorwan Stoddard, 76, who died protecting his wife; Gabriel Zimmerman, 30, one of Giffords staffers; and 9-year-old Christina Green, born on September 11, 2001, who wanted to be a vet and was interested in politics.
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The Monday silence was welcome, forcing many across America to, for once, pause, reflect, and shut up. If any good is to come from the Tucson tragedy – and there must be some good, surely? – it is that the volume might be turned down, way down. Please.
Sarah Palin and her ilk appear surprised they've been criticised for their previous heated rhetoric, use of language and tone in their political campaigns.
Inflammatory Twitter postings on Palin's account were deleted after the Tucson shooting so someone finally realised something might not be totally appropriate.
A Palin staffer claimed the “Take Back The 20” campaign last year was not intended to incite violence and was a misunderstanding.
Of course, it wasn't.
But someone somewhere might always interpret messages urging supporters to “Don't retreat, instead –– RELOAD!” literally. Especially when those statements are accompanied by a website with a map of political targets highlighted by crosshairs (the site has been taken down since the shooting).
Giffords was included on Palin's hit list. Shame about that.
“We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights,” claimed Palin staffer Rebecca Mansour in a radio interview.
“It's surveyor's symbols," the interviewer replied.
“We never imagined, it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent,” Mansour said. She added the symbols were “crosshairs that you would see on a map."
But as The Guardian's Gary Younge points out: “Fights outside town hall meetings, guns outside rallies, Facebook pages calling for assassinations, discussions about the most propitious moment for armed insurrection… to dismiss these as the voices and actions of the marginal was to miss the point and misunderstand the trend.”
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, one of Tuscon's most senior law enforcement officials knew exactly where the spotlight should shine in looking for clues to the violence that killed six people.
“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government…” he said at a press conference after the shooting, “…the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona…[has] become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
Loughner, who at the time of writing has been arrested and charged but is not cooperating with police, has not explained his motives.
But on Saturday, at 5am, he left a message on his MySpace page. It read: “Goodbye. Dear friends... Please don't be mad at me.”
Sadly, six dead people won't get the irony in that.
