A Sure Route to Fame

NPR headlined a story about the motivations of assassins this a.m., digging up work done in the 1980s by the Secret Service following multiple attempts on the lives of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The researchers ended up collecting data on some 83 assassins and would-be assassins, some of them unknown to the public though nevertheless locked up as dangerous. Several of them were extensively interviewed (and given anonymity when requested for the subsequent research published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 1999).

Although reading through the short list of assassins and would-be assassins published on the NPR site as a side-bar gives a slightly different impression, the gist of the research suggests that "assassinations of political figures were almost never for political reasons":

"It was very, very rare for the primary motive to be political, though there were a number of attackers who appeared to clothe their motives with some political rhetoric" ....

What emerges from the study is that rather than being politically motivated, many of the assassins and would-be assassins simply felt invisible. In the year before their attacks, most struggled with acute reversals and disappointment in their lives, which, the paper argues, was the true motive. They didn't want to see themselves as nonentities.

"They experienced failure after failure after failure, and decided that rather than being a 'nobody,' they wanted to be a 'somebody' " ....

Among the character profiles is one "FT," an anonymous predator presumably locked up but one who shared his motivations with the researchers:

"FT was a lonely, angry young man with few job skills, living with a mother who was ill with cancer and other ailments and who demanded his constant attention. FT was watching a television show about the state gubernatorial election when he suddenly thought, 'How weird it would be to assassinate the governor.' He then started to read and learn about assassination and assassins and spent the next 18 months preoccupied with selecting and shooting a national leader," study authors wrote. (No public information is available on whom FT attempted to assassinate or when.)

The researchers also maintained that an easy assumption of insanity is just wrong:

"There's nothing crazy about thinking that if I attacked the president or a major public official, I would get a lot of attention. I would get a lot of attention. My goal was notoriety," [one of the researchers] says. "That's why I bought the weapon."

And most of the assassins and would-be assassins weren't totally disorganized by mental illness, either.

"They were quite organized .... Because one has to be organized — at least to some extent — to attack a public official."

The Rhetoric of Violence

A list by no means complete and in no particular order:

1. From the campaign calendar of Jesse Kelly, the Tea Party Republican who ran against Gabrielle Giffords last fall: "Sat, 6/12/10, 10:00 AM - Get on Target for Victory in November - Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office - Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly"

2. Republican senatorial candidate Sharon Angle, who said she wanted to "cure" Nevada of Sen. Harry Reid and said she knew a Second Amendment "remedy": "I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical...."

3. Florida GOP congressional candidate Allen West, talking to a crowd of Tea Partiers about his opponent last fall, incumbent Dem Ron Klein: "Let me tell you what you've got to do. You've got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house. That's the only way that you're going to win. That's the only way you're going to get these people's attention."

4. Someone dropped a gun at a Gabrielle Giffords event in August 2009. Also that August, another man brought a gun to a town hall meeting by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) in Memphis. On August 18, 2009, at least a dozen men were carrying weapons outside the Phoenix convention center where President Barack Obama was giving a speech. The week before that in 2009, during a presidential health care town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., a man carrying a sign reading "It is time to water the tree of liberty" stood outside with a pistol strapped to his leg.

5. On the May 17, 2005, broadcast of The Glenn Beck Program, Mr. Beck said: "Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong?"

6. Bill O'Reilly mentioned Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller on his radio show 29 times between 2005 and the doctor's assassination in his church on Sunday, May 31, 2009, nicknaming the doctor "Tiller the Killer."

7. In August 2010, a day after talk radio host Laura Schlessinger quit her show, following criticism for using the N-word repeatedly in a broadcast, Sarah Palin told her: "Don't retreat ... reload!" Subsequently, Palin used that line repeatedly in public rallies.

8. On March 4, 2010, James L. Schmidlin placed a call from Tennessee to the office of Democratic Congressman John Boccieri, in which he threatened to set fire to Boccieri's home. (Schmidlin has actually been charged with a crime.)

9. On March 20, 2010, at the Tea Party Republican rally against health-care reform on Capitol Hill, several protestors carried signs reading "If [Sen. Scott] Brown Can't Stop It, A Browning Can." Another: "Vote No Or Else!" Another: "Kill the Bill or Face the November Slaughter!"

10. In September 2010, Justin Carl Moose, 26, of Concord, NC, was arrested by the FBI after posting tips on bomb-making and making threats against Planned Parenthood on his Facebook page. According to the FBI, he had planned the bombing of an abortion clinic in North Carolina.

11. "I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that [health reform] bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country." --Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, November 2, 2009, on the floor of the U.S. House. "All the promises [President Obama] has kept have endangered our lives." --Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, on the Bill Lumaye Show, NewsRadio 680 WPTF, Jan. 5, 2010. "We're talking about four years. If we don't take this country back from the leftists who are running it now, we will lose our country." ---Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, to the Iredell County Republican Party's Reagan Day Dinner, Feb. 6, 2010

Not that any of this would have anything whatsoever to do with influencing the mind of a Jared Lee Loughner. No never.