To me, his choice of victim and the context surrounding that choice is more revealing than Loughner's writings are. His illness made him vulnerable to incendiary rhetoric.
Possibly but it seems he had made contact with her since 2007:
cbsnews.com
msnbc.msn.com
motherjones.com
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." Loughner's animus toward Giffords intensified after he attended one of her campaign events and she did not, in his view, sufficiently answer a question he had posed, Tierney says. He also describes Loughner as being obsessed with "lucid dreaming"—that is, the idea that conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control—and says Loughner became "more interested in this world than our reality." Tierney adds, "I saw his dream journal once. That's the golden piece of evidence. You want to know what goes on in Jared Loughner's mind, there's a dream journal that will tell you everything."
This was in 2007:
"Loughner's animus toward Giffords intensified after he attended one of her campaign events and she did not, in his view, sufficiently answer a question he had posed."
Reminds me more of John Lennon's killer or John Hinkley's attempted assassination of Reagan. (As I remember the some members of the Right said Hinkley was influenced by the negative press on Reagan...) |
