Granted, I don’t like the violent tones and metaphors that are used. But if I hear them, then I know something about the speaker and tune them out. There is more meaningful ways to communicate with the public, the media, “the crowd”

But as Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a research psychiatrist, writes in his book, “The Insanity Offense,” about 1 percent of the seriously mentally ill (or about 40,000 individuals) are violent. They account for about half the rampage murders in the United States.

quoted here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/opinion/11brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/13/obeidallah.loughner.muslims/index.html?hpt=T2

“All we had asked following this weekend’s tragedy was for prayers for the dead and wounded, and for all of us to take a step back and look inward to see how we can improve the tenor of our coarsening public debate.”

http://www.truth-out.org/jewish-groups-we-are-deeply-disturbed-by-palins-use-anti-semitic-term-blood-libel-she-should-apolog

The madness that is the human condition is regulated for most by the frontal cortex, which reality tests and delays impulses…somewhere in there is a profound awareness that other people exist outside our fantasies and that my impulses need regulation, if nothing else, to protect my neighbor.

Severe Mental Illness, from Kip Kinkle to the Virginia Tech killer, to Loughner is easily recognizable prior to the fact, and much more obvious after the fact.

The overwhelming SMI are harmless; and mostly dangerous to themselves through neglect or self-endangerment.

Video games, political rhetoric, violent movies seem far too detached from the facts to account for the violent event.

If they are the cause there are 1000 acts of entertainment a person views freely everyday, which could incite rape, murder and left.

In a free society (the one we currently have) protecting the brittle and the fragile mind from this “stuff” is impossible. A sick mind can feast, both passively and actively every day in multiple venues…until it gets its fill.

The rest is then planning and implementation.

Your argument can be turned against you by fundamentalists

That’s true of any argument with fundamentalists. One reason I am trying not to engage them as much nowadays :).

David and/or Warren: Would you agree that one of the characteristics of mental illness (particularly psychotic disorders) is difficultly with reality testing and a tendency to think concretely?

It has been my experience with delusional or paranoid patients that they tend not to “get” metaphors. If someone mentions “skating of thin ice”, they think literal ice. If someone is said to be “between a rock and a hard place”, they think actual stones.

I am not arguing that this shooter was responding to the violent political rhetoric of our times. We have no way of knowing for sure what his motivations were. That he was (is) deeply troubled is all we know. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not asserting that violent metaphors cause these sorts of explosive outbursts.

Only that we ought to be more careful about the words we choose. Violent metaphors may or may not increase the likelihood of violence, but why take that chance? Why not have all political leaders make a commitment to be more civil? Who could that hurt?

Your argument can be turned against you by fundamentalists who argue that teaching about sexual minorities exposes “vulnerable populations” to information that will convert them to homosexuality.

There is just too much going on in a person’s head, and in their past and too much effort during their developmental years to teach them how to process fact from fiction for your assertion to carry much weight.

you offer a perfect example of the rot coming from the right. Krugman is a Nobel laureate – how dare you slander him so ignorantly: Krauthammer is a professional, for-profit hack. The vitriol comes from the right: Fox, AM Radio, Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, Bachmann, Coulter, Malkin; all the for-profit opinionators on hire from Koch industries. – I hear it when I drive around, an unrelenting assault on Democrats, on unions, on free-thinkers, on the educated, the arts, the cultured, on anything that doesn’t put money in their pockets.