Thanks for the link to Echnidne. It’s all so utterly predictable. (And here’s more for the folks who think that too few guns are the problem: two CA high school students accidentally gravely injured by a gun brought to school by a classmate.)

As I said above, I think white, male suburbia produces its fair share of Jared Lee Loughners, regardless of how we want to label their mental afflictions. I have nothing but sympathy for anyone struggling with mental illness. My problem with this incident is the easy availability of guns and the culture that encourages people to act out in violent ways.

This blog is not about the sensibilities of talking about mental illness and whether or not it’s polite to talk about the mental illness factor in mass murder. This is a feminist blog, and it’s my blog, so I can talk about what I want to talk about and ban whomever doesn’t stay on topic.

This thread is YET AGAIN proof that gender is indeed the most obvious factor in mass incidents of gun violence. We want to talk about just about everything BUT the fact that it’s guys & guns that are the problem.

Anyone who has a problem with this is free to take their business elsewhere!

Personally, I hardly think aspiring for greater precision in language and fewer sweeping generalizations about broad classes of people represents “refined sensibilities” on my part.

Nor do I see this as “letting the killers off the hook” — I see it as not putting the mentally ill as a group *on* the hook.

As for whether the media focuses only on the killers, while the dead are ignored, while I’m not sure I agree with that view, I understand the point. Surely, it has in part to do with our inability to comprehend how someone could do something so awful. But how does reinforcing stereotypes and biases help our understanding?

Nothing I said suggests that I am not, “offended by the assassination attempt on an elected official that injured 13 and killed 6 bystanders.” But since when does our moral outrage entitle us to slander the innocent? That’s the logic upon which objections to the Muslim community center near the World Trade Center are based.