Is this the best time to have a gun show in Tucson, just a week after a notorious political assassination was attempted?
Exactly one week after the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, on Saturday, Jan. 15 and Sunday, Jan. 15, Pima County, where the shooting took place, is hosting the region's largest gun show, Crossroads of the West. Crossroads is not just any gun show. According to blogs on the right, Crossroads was ridden out of "radical" California on a rail when the L.A. County supervisors decided that Crossroads was basically a den of domestic arms dealers inciting irresponsible gun use in the nation's most populous county. Crossroads fled right across the border to Tucson, according to its blogger friends. And it's putting down its stakes in Tucson this weekend. Good timing.
You can see the billboard by clicking here. Note the crosshairs.
Wow.
It's not surprising that the gun show takes place here. Tucson's hospitable to conventioneers and Tucsonans are friendly to people of all types and persuasions (even immigrants - we aren't called "Berkeley in the Desert" for nothing). We're close enough to Phoenix and also to the border. Since gun sales in Arizona are virtually unregulated, Mexican drug gangs frequent gun shows. They constitute a major market for the weapons dealers. The gun show producers are maximizing their return on investment, just like a Wall Street banker.
For those new to town and tourists reading the Weekly for the first time, Pima County surrounding Tucson isn't as liberal as the city. When Giffords held a healthcare town hall in summer 2009, hundreds of angry out-of-towners commuted to it, bringing their bile. During the 2010 midterm election campaign, which Gabby won by only 4,000 votes (about 1%), her opponent, Jesse Kelly, would-be destroyer of government, threw a fundraiser featuring a chance to fire an actual M-16. (Wow!) His official "I hate Washington" theme was frequently conflated, often intentionally, with the "I hate Giffords" message spread by his more extreme supporters. Kelly got additional support from Koch Brother-funded hate ads. And post-election ads run by Karl Rove persisted right up to the time of the shooting.
As a result, Giffords, one of the most likable and accessible members of Congress, now has two followings at home: one that loves her, one that doesn't. Assassin Jared Lee Loughner is one of the latter. Last Saturday, he decided to act on his mad obsession to strike back at Giffords for an imagined slight. He used a gun.
As Giffords herself observed during an interview, "We live in a gun culture [in Arizona]." She defends the right to bear arms. It's impossible to say otherwise in Arizona, where the NRA directs a majority of the electorate. It's legal in Arizona to carry a concealed weapon into a bar and it soon may be the same in our schools. There's no law here to prevent a deranged person from buying a gun. For a cool $500, Loughner bought a time-tested killing machine, a Glock 9mm automatic pistol made in Austria (where public ownership of such weapons is generally discouraged). Last Saturday morning, Walmart sold him bullets, even in his crazy state, for 22¢ apiece. ( "Save money. Die better.") Within an hour, six people were dead and Giffords was badly wounded, leaving her in critical condition. The gun show crowd denies Jared Lee Loughner's affiliation, but they buy their guns and ammunition in the same shops and in equal quantities.
Ed Schultz reports that this week, following the shooting, sales of Glock pistols are up 60 percent. Among the new buyers may be not just one but several copycat killers.
So: is this the best time to have a gun show, just a week after a notorious political assassination was attempted? When the question was put to the Crossroads, it quickly responded, "You're welcome to join us this weekend, just like before." The show must go on. Even if it results in arming another political attacker.
(I also asked the Southwestern Fairgrounds Commission, Inc., the privatized former organ of county government that runs the Fairgrounds to make a profit, if it's going to block the event or ignore the shooting -- which would have catastrophic consequences for Tucson's reputation throughout the U.S. and around the world. So far, the Fairgrounds website reports no change in the Commission's plans for the weekend.)
You'd think there would be a public outcry about this travesty. What would it take to postpone the Crossroads gun show? Another assault with a gun? Another murder? The murder of another elected official? Would that suffice to postpone the gun fetishists' ecstasy and the drug dealers "up-arming" with the latest technology of death?
So far the press has been either unaware or unconcerned about this situation. Local news reporting has missed it and national coverage is focused on Big Picture items. Someone needs to get on the ball and stop this lest Tucson's people and yet another victim - or many victims - suffer at the hands of a copycat killer standing at the Crossroads.