2nd Amendment Remedies (Updated) (Updated Again and Kicked to the Top) 1

(First published January 8.)

From AZCentral dot com:

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is out of surgery and one of her surgeons said “I’m very optimistic about her recovery.”

“She was shot one time in the head through and through,” Dr. Peter Rhee said at an afternoon news conference at University Medical Center in Tucson.

The bullet entered one side of her head and exited the other after passing through her brain, Rhee said.

Giffords, 40, a third-term Democrat, was shot at an event in Tucson Saturday morning, at a Safeway at Ina and Oracle roads. Authorities identified the gunman as Jared Loughner and said the 22-year-old suspect is in custody. (Initial news accounts and reports from authorities misidentified the name as Laughner.)

Six people, including a girl who was about 9 years old, were killed and 18 were injured in the shooting at a Safeway in northwest Tucson at Ina and Oracle roads. Sources told The Republic that federal Judge John Roll was among the six killed.

President Obama speaks on the shooting:

TPM has the latest on the suspect. He appears to be a rightwing loonie of the type which calls itself “sovereign citizens.” (TPM is likely the best site for keeping up with this story as it breaks.)

No doubt this was completely unrelated to the drumbeat of anti-government and anti-Obama sentiment in Wingnut World.

This SPLC video, prepared for police to use for training during shift roll-calls, describes the particular form of sovereign citizen lunacy. The video is not for the squeamish.

Read more about sovereign citizens here.

Addendum:

The county sheriff speaks:

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,” he said. “And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

In the meantime, those who speak the rhetoric of violence are busily washing their hands, saying, “Oh, no. It wasn’t us.”

I need a drink.

Addendum-dee-dum-dum, Two Days Later:

Another indication of the shooter’s having been attracted to the “sovereign citizen” ideology (idiotology?) is his fascination with language, as outlined in the Guardian this Monday:

Some reports have connected this with the arguments of David Wynn Miller – or as he styles himself, Judge David-Wynn: Miller – whose near-impenetrable, capital letter-heavy website expounds the notion that grammar is used to control the populace, and that by inserting colons or hyphens into your name you can escape taxable status by becoming a “prepositional phrase”.

While a small number of defendants have previously sought, without success, to use Wynn Miller’s methods to defend themselves against tax avoidance charges, he has until now remained largely unknown outside of far-right US circles. His name was connected to the Loughner inquiry when an official from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which monitors extremist groups, told US television that it seemed Loughner had been “getting some of his key ideas from David Wynn Miller”.