The Rhetoric of Violence: Sarah Palin's Response to the Tucson Shooting

On January 7, 2011, Arizona Democratic congresswoman Gabrille Giffords sent an email to a friend in Kentucky, Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson. Grayson had recently been offered the prestigious position of director of Harvard's Institute of Politics and Giffords wrote to congratulate him. "After you get settled," she wrote, "I would love to talk about what we can do to promote centrism and moderation. I am one of only 12 Dems left in a GOP district (the only woman) and think that we need to figure out how to tone our rhetoric and partisanship down" (Terkel). Giffords' plans for a civil rhetoric were interrupted when, the next day, at a "Congress on Your Corner" event in Tucson, a vigilante shot her in the head. She survived, but six others died.

Tragedy tends to defy precisely what it demands—explanation. Who is Jared Lee Loughner, and why did he do it? Many accounts circulated in the days and weeks following the shooting. Some blamed Arizona's lax gun laws, others the lack of funding devoted to treating the mentally ill. When Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik stepped up to a podium on January 8 to give a statement on the shooting, he cited these factors. He then took the conversation in a different, and for many, unexpected, direction by blaming political discourse, the very thing Giffords herself feared and hoped to moderate. For him, the angry, polarizing, take-no-prisoners, violent talk of the Republican Right—its "vitriolic rhetoric"—was the primary cause of the shooting. Americans searching for an explanation need look no further than Talk Radio and Fox News, than campaign ads graced with gun sights and speeches with the words of war. "To try to inflame the public on a daily basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with," Dupnik claimed, concluding that "it's time that this country take a little introspective look at the crap that comes out on radio and TV" (Wallsten).

This brings us to Sarah Palin. Indeed, the former Alaska Governor and GOP Vice-Presidential Candidate is cited by many as a central figure fueling the deterioration of American public discourse. Coming from a far-away and exotic place that few Americans have visited, during the 2008 presidential election—and then during her 2010 reality show "Sarah Palin's Alaska" on TLC—Palin was packaged as a down-to-earth denizen of the last real American frontier, a place where violence is natural because existence is hard, where guns are everywhere, where everyone hunts and it is perfectly acceptable to snipe wolves from a plane. During the 2008 campaign, she framed herself as a "Mamma Grizzly" (she then ran into a real life Mamma Grizzly on the premier of her reality show). During the 2010 midterm elections her rhetoric continued to be violent: one of her slogans was "Don't Retreat, Reload," she urged supporters to "Take Up Arms," and she posted a now infamous map on her PAC website that marked seventeen winnable congressional districts held by Democrats with gun sights—including Giffords' district in Arizona. While the "targeting" metaphor is common to a postmodern political discourse that has been thoroughly militarized, and while both political parties talk about "targeting" vulnerable incumbents, this visualization of the metaphor was particularly striking given that one of the politicians metaphorically "targeted" was subsequently shot (Weber). It was therefore only natural that commentators asked about the relationship between violent language and violent deed.

In the days following the tragedy, many commentators signaled Palin out for opprobrium. While she initially responded with several brief Facebook and Twitter messages, she offered a more substantive response on Wednesday, January 12, in the form of an eight-minute video released online (the transcript was posted on her Facebook page). The timing of the speech's release suggests that it was intended to preempt President Obama's speech at the University of Arizona that evening. If her goal was to dominate the day's news cycle, she was...