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Editor:  This was sent by one of our Alaska readers living in Talkeetna.   The home of Sarah Palin is in Wassilla some 55 miles away.  Palin used the image of a gun crosshairs on some of her political publications prior to the last US congressional election.  As you can see the congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is 'targeted'

A gunman shoots Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and more than a dozen others at a get-to-know-you meeting for her constituents. We clutch our hands to our chests and pray his agenda was not political. We¹re all of us clinging to the desperate hope that the shooter is a run-of-the-mill whacko with above-average aim.

We¹re hoping the man behind the gun is a delusional moth seizing an opportunity to get close to a bright light. We¹re hoping that Gabrielle Giffords wasn¹t targeted because she is a Democrat. We¹re tight-lipped and tense, though, because the congresswoman was one of the subjects rhetorically depicted on a Sarah Palin web-page as a target in her
national campaign for revolutionary change.

That Palin marked Congresswoman Giffords on the map with rifle crosshairs is, we hope, just coincidental to the use of a firearm to achieve this gunman¹s fifteen minutes of fame.

We¹re hoping the toxic, partisan atmosphere in the country has nothing to do with the assassination attempt. That the congresswoman stood against
Arizona¹s Draconian immigration law is, we pray, not relevant to the shooter¹s motives. Nor do we want her positive vote for universal healthcare to be his call to action.

No. We¹re all of us hoping this is merely the random play of another run-of-the-mill whacko with above average aim.

If politics are not a motive for this heinous spectacle, we can all breathe easier tonight. Mass-shootings being, after-all, merely an insignificant cost of our constitutional right to bear semi-automatic weapons with 30-round clips.

Talkeetna Reader

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Thursday, January 13, 2011