His name is Jared Loughner (many outlets are reporting as Laughner) and he is a 22-yo from Tucson.
He has a youtube page with four videos, all posted in the last month. The videos are explicitly ideological, calling for a "second US constitution" and for a return to a gold and silver standard for currency.
This is a short diary, but I'll leave it at that. It's important info, and most of the media is in fact getting his name wrong.
I'm going to link to, but not embed, his youtube page. Go there and check it out: http://www.youtube.com/...
Updates on the flip
In the linked video, Loughner claims to be a military reservist, and he also offers definitions of terrorism. His youtube profile includes this information:
I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.
Missing are Ayn Rand's most well-known books and the collected works of Ron Paul...
Loughner also writes in the past tense on the youtube page. It makes you wonder if he planned this assassination as a suicide attack.