Anastasia Inez
Mrs. Marilyn Patton
EWRT2
February 7, 2011
Traumatic Yet So Tragic: The Tucson Tragedy
15 seconds to fire the glock, 31 bullets in one clip, and 19 victims with 6 killed and 13 wounded. Just one man and a gun did those things that I just mentioned above. The shooting in Arizona happened to be so tragic. It was a mass shooting that occurred in Tucson, Arizona. I never knew that another tragedy similar to the one that happened at Virginia Tech would happen again for a second time.
January 8 2011 was an ordinary day before the shooting happened. Jared Lee Loughner was just heading to Safeway by a taxicab wearing a hoodie and sunglasses, and having got change from the cashier to pay the cabdriver, made the day ugly and twisted (Von Drehle 28). He shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in her head while she as hosting a meet-and-greet with her constituents. Von Drehle said that Loughner shot her because she did not answer his nonsensical question in 2007. Within a few seconds, eighteen more people were wounded, and six of them were brutally killed. Christina Green who was a nine-year-old girl with mahogany bangs and one of those great third grader smiles was one of the victims. She died with a bullet in her chest. She was able to make it to the hospital, but sadly it was a little too late. The other five victims were John Roll, Phyllis Schneck, Gabe Zimmerman, Dorothy Morris, and Dorwan Stoddard. Most of the victims were strangers and had no connection at all with Loughner.
One of the main reasons why Jared Loughner fired the glock was because he loathed Representative Gabrielle Giffords for not answering his question at an open meeting in 2007. Ever since that, he thought she was fake, and he just had something against her. But actually, the reason why he did it was because:
The symptoms and trajectory of his disease followed the classing pattern so completely that research psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey could say, without ever meeting Loughner, that “chances are 99% that he has schizophrenia (E. Fuller Torrey qtd. in Von Drehle 28)
According to the National Institute of Mental Health:
People with the disorder may hear voices other people don’t hear. They may believe other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts or plotting to harm them. This can terrify people with the illness and make them withdrawn or extremely agitated. People with schizophrenia may not make sense when thy talk. They may sit for hours without moving or talking. Sometimes people with schizophrenia seem perfectly fine until they talk about what they are really thinking (National Institute of Mental Health qtd. in Von Drehle 28).
This incident didn’t make anyone happy; instead it made everyone’s lives miserable. There was no utilitarian value that we could find from this incident. But we couldn’t blame Loughner for having that disease. A person like Loughner has a really high libertarian value because he doesn’t really care about anyone else but himself. Based on my religious value, God must have a better plan for the world; in other words, God is always good. I have two ways of thinking: I pity Loughner since he had this disease and it took control of him, and on the other hand he killed people that he did have no connection to. Here is one out of the many statistics from the article:
Many people are blaming mental illness for the massacre, but a more reliable set of predictors of violent crime are age (arrests for violent crime peak at about 18), gender (each year men commit roughly 80% of the violent crimes in the U.S.), lower socioeconomic status and history of arrest. (Loughner fits all four.)(Von Drehle 35)
Even before the shooting, Lougher had drinking problems and he smoked weed, but he was able to stop and began working out. Loughner tried to register in the Army but was declined after admitting to a history of dope smoking. A number of students in his previous college stayed after class to complain because he had this kind of shaking and trembling as if he was under the influence of drugs. Four weeks into the term, the college suspended Loughner and told him that he could not return to class until he had a letter from a mental-health professional certifying that he was not dangerous (Von Drehle 29).
Every time we experience loss, whether it’s personal or national, we hear them recited: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. There are a lot of misconceptions about grief: we grieve in stages, grief needs to be expressed and not be repressed, grief is harder on woman, grief never ends, and counseling helps reduce grief. When all natural human beings faced any kind of loss, they will go from shock all the way through acceptance. Therefore we are going to have stages. Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process; it sounds good but it’s actually expressing negative emotions that can actually prolong your distress (Konigsberg 42-6).
At first, the value assumption (major premise) that I understood was that Loughner would just kill the person who opposed and disrespected him. But the reality assumption seems to be different; he shot his target but then he shot other strangers – killing six people and wounding nineteen other victims.
It’s unbelievable how another massacre would happen again in the United States. I did the role-exchange-test as if I was one of the relatives of the victims. I would be in an extremely deep state of grief and would have this feeling of abhorrence to Loughner. Let’s hope that in the future, people having schizophrenia can be cured so that they can control themselves, and so there will be no more grief for a lot of people.
Works Cited
Konigsberg, Ruth. “Good News About Grief.” TIME. 24 Jan 2011: 42-46. Print.
Von Drehle, David. “1 Madman And A Gun.” TIME. 24 Jan 2011: 26-35. Print.
