A Safeway in Arizona

October 17, 2011
Writer and fifth-generation Arizonan Zoellner (Uranium) seeks “to make sense of a fundamentally baffling event” in this rambling examination of the January 8, 2011, shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Jared Lee Loughner—22 years old, unemployed, and “obviously deranged”—killed six people and wounded 13, including Giffords, when he opened fire at a political meet and greet at a Tucson Safeway. Concluding that events “never happen in a vacuum,” the author searches for clues to the tragedy in the context in which the shooting took place. He finds his answers in the dysfunctional social and political culture of Arizona—its isolation, misplaced paranoia about immigration, gun laws, the “withering” of its mental health care system, absent leadership, and the partisan nastiness of politics and talk radio. Even while conceding that there is only one responsible party for the tragedy and that he is “gravely mentally ill,” Zoellner concludes that “Loughner’s feelings of existential helplessness were a distorted amplification of what surrounded him that year in Arizona.” Zoellner, a personal friend of Giffords, admits that this is “not a work of objective journalism,” and his subjective rendering of Arizona proves problematic, as is his effort to connect the dots between cause and effect.