Absolutely Everyone Thought This Kid Was Going On a Shooting Spree

The old cliche when a young man does a shooting rampage is that nobody saw it coming. Nobody thought the kid they knew could do such a thing. Not the case with Jared Loughner. "Oh, finally. Was wondering when he was going to shoot a bunch of people." This is what the people who knew this kid the past few years are saying. But while this concerned some people, Arizona was never going to try to help him or anything. Personal responsibility! Fix your own mental health! Pew pew pew! What Arizona was interested in was giving this kid his murder weapon and allowing him to conceal it. For them, the only time he did anything out of the ordinary was when a bullet he bought pierced the flesh of an innocent person.

But later in the day, when Tierney first heard about the Tucson massacre, he had a sickening feeling: "They hadn't released the name, but I said, 'Holy shit, I think it's Jared that did it.'" Tierney tells Mother Jones in an exclusive interview that Loughner held a years-long grudge against Giffords and had repeatedly derided her as a "fake."

“We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today, I’m not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit,” Ms. Sorenson wrote in an e-mail in June that was forwarded Sunday to The New York Times.

“The teacher tried to throw him out and he refused to go, so I talked to the teacher afterward. Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon.” [...]

At a meeting in early October at the college’s northwest campus, where he attended classes, Mr. Loughner said he would withdraw. Three days later, the college sent him a letter telling him that if he wanted to return, he would need to undergo a mental health evaluation. “After this event, there was no further college contact with Loughner,” the college said in a statement.

One of the talking points about the Tucson shooting is that the gun used is “just the same as the one police use”, and that’s true – the Glock 9mm pistol is a common police sidearm. But, police carry it with a 15 shot clip, not the 30+ shot extended magazine pictured here. By the definition of the assault weapon ban, it’s an assault gun with that extended mag.

Jan Brewer is very upset about this. Not about the selling of a gun or the fact that the state is terrible at caring for the mentally ill; that's the right thing to do. She's upset Loughner is not a Mexican, because Mexicans are approximately every criminal ever, and if he looked Mexican at all, police would have been legally obligated to check him out every five feet he moved through the state. He may have never made it to the Safeway. Most Mexicans can't.

This is still their fault, somehow. They are so violent! That's probably where he learned it! [ Mother Jones / NYT / Balloon Juice ]