Arizona Dream**

As time passes, I feel more and more saddened by the shooting that took place over the weekend in Tucson, Arizona. Hearing and reading the stories of the victims is making the event much more real and human, and therefore sadder. Unfortunately, the ensuing events, from the reaction of the politicians, to how different civil society actors are behaving and ultimately how the public is absorbing this shock are no more consoling than the event itself.

I decided I owe myself a brief piece on this. I needed to write something to bring order to all the disheveled feelings and thoughts that are running around in my heart and mind. I started by a search on the web for the shooting. The most reasonable keyword that came to my mind was: “Arizona Shooting.” The heartache that came upon me when I saw the result of the search dwarfed the sadness I was experiencing a minute earlier. The first two websites that come up on google.com are: Arizonashooting.com, also known as: AZS, and Arizonashooting.net. These are websites that provide information about firearms and shooting possibilities in the state of Arizona.

One other news piece that comes up is another shooting story that got nearly no national press. In August 2010, a gunman in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, fatally shot 5 people, before he took his own life. No one blinked!

On Saturday, 8 of January 2011, the 22-year-old Jared Loughner, emptied a clip of 31 9mm bullets from his semi-automatic pistol on a crowd that has congregated to talk to congresswoman Gifford. He was loading his gun with the second clip when the public managed to disarm him and stop the mayhem. In this shooting, six were killed, including a judge and a nine-year-old girl, and 14 injured, including the congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Everyone is bomb-shelled!

What is even more worrisome than the shooting itself are the reactions to this tragedy. To honor the lost lives of the victims of this shooting, we should feel obligated to look at the root causes of this tragedy instead of generating momentum for our political career and party. This was exactly what I was thinking after the tragedy of 9/11 (on which very day Christina-Taylor Green, a victim of the Saturday shooting, was born): will America wake up and look at where this really came from. Alas, the blood of the 6 killed seems to be going to vein as not much debate is being formed around the core of what brought this event to life. Just like the lives of those 3000 who died on 9/11, which was abused by political forces to acquire further dominance on the global scene.

If you turn on your TV or read opinion pieces in respected media outlets, it is not hard to see how everyone is trying to pinpoint the one rhetoric that instigated the Saturday event. It is true that we should all be reminded of how much consequences words alone can bring about. But the power of words are limited if the receiving end is a balanced and educated individual who does not take things literally. What does the American public education system do to prevent a 7 year old Jared Loughner from becoming a 22-year-old hateful individual who holds a gun just like one holds a cellphone? This is not about Sarah Palin's crosshairs. This is about America!

I wish we would all stop for a second, take a deep breath and think about what happened. Lets think about our media: wouldn’t be nice to be able to “draw a better distinction between the manifestos of paranoid madman [sic] and what passes for acceptable political and pundit speak” (John Stewart, host of the Daily Show). “Lets at least make troubled individuals easier to spot.”

But the sad and worrying news does not stop coming in:
Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas announced that it will picket the funeral of Christina Green, the 9-year-old who was among six people killed during Saturday's attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona. The Westboro Baptist Church is “known for its inflammatory anti-gay protests.” This is what this church has posted on its website: "THANK GOD FOR THE SHOOTER -- 6 DEAD!" What?? What does a 9-year-old have to do with anything political or religious?

And last, but not least, Bloomberg puts out an article that shows how Americans are frantically buying arms since the news of the Saturday shooting broke. “One-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent on Jan. 10 compared with the corresponding Monday a year ago.” The FBI data shows that the data for one-day sale of handguns on January 10, 2011 jumped “65 percent in Ohio, 16 percent in California, 38 percent in Illinois and 33 percent in New York,” as compared to the previous year, same day.

This all proves one more time how the reactionary nature of this country is not limited to its politicians, but goes down right to its civil society and the general public. After all United States is a representative democracy!

If America continues to take each of these events as isolated occurrences and therefore formulate its responses to each of them in isolation—as America often does—the tale-chasing game will continue.

Lets review these events that I am talking about (which is just a few among many):

- The first two most popular websites that comes up from search on Arizona Shooting, are two firearm websites. Mind you that I did the search 4 days after the story of the shooting has been the top news story of the US and possibly the world and still the high number of hits for these two websites keeps them at the top of the list of search results.

- Not even 6 months ago, a gunman killed 6 people with a pistol in Arizona. This story hardly made it to any national media.

- Politicians are busying themselves with gaining political credit out of the Arizona shooting.

- An extremist church, “known for its inflammatory anti-gay protests, plans to picket the funerals of the six people gunned down in Arizona on Saturday.” And,

- The purchase of handguns increased up to 60% in some of states two days after the shooting.

It is only if we start bringing all of these together that the puzzle starts making sense and in turn we will be able to formulate a meaningful response to it. Let’s stop reacting and start reflecting.

**Arizona Dream is a classic 1993 film directed by Emir Kusturica.