Jared Lee Loughner's Strange YouTube Videos

Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and over a dozen other people outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona today, including U.S. District Judge John Roll. While initial reports claimed Representative Giffords had been killed, later it was revealed that she underwent surgery and is in recovery, her prognosis currently unknown.

Before the name of the gunman was released, the media and the Internet was abuzz with speculation. Because protesters exercised their open-carry rights at Tea Party rallies in Arizona last year, and because Sarah Palin's SarahPAC had released a map with gun sights on it targeting Congresspeople they wished to defeat - Rep. Giffords was one of them - some speculated that the shooter was a Tea Party activist. Others thought, because a rumor floated that he had been in a relationship with one of Giffords' staff, that it might be personally motivated.

However, with the release of the gunman's name and the information on him in Jared Lee Loughner's YouTube videos, it appears that Jared Lee Loughner may have had tenuous ties, at best, to any political affiliation. Instead, there is every indication that Loughner had schizophrenia, a mental illness that disproportionately affects males and that strikes without warning, usually in the victim's late teens or early twenties.

The content of the videos, while disturbing, is notable less for its political bent than for its psychotic bent. The videos are simply screens of text, and crazy text it is: rambling about "making your own currency," "the current treasonous laws," his own definition of terrorism, and something where I think he's implying he doesn't need sleep - always a great handmaiden to psychosis.

However, many of Jared Lee Loughner's YouTube ramblings are eerily reminiscent of Tea Party rhetoric: complaints that "The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the...Constitution," insistence on the need for a gold-backed currency, and mutterings about "revolution." While Loughner was probably not active in politics, it's probable that the somewhat violent Tea Party rhetoric about "Second Amendment solutions" and how "the tree of liberty must be watered" gave him the push to seek out a Democratic victim.

These ramblings are classic expressions of the schizophrenic mind. Loughner likely had a normal childhood and teenage years, joined the military, and is rumored to be an Afghan vet. Within the past year or two, he probably developed this paranoid schizophrenia, possibly undiagnosed, and has been laboring under its influence since.
It doesn't explain away or forgive what he did. But it can help us to understand. And hopefully, it can help to shed light on the plight of the mentally ill.