Attempts on the lives of public figures rarely correspond directly to hate speech, but others have suffered the cost of thuggish prattle about resorting to arms.

 

It’s difficult to say where exactly extremist speech has led directly to political violence in the United States. The man who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and murdered six others in Arizona seems to have been motivated by a convoluted, peculiar ideology, if it can be termed an ideology at all.

This tragedy appears to speak more to the difficulty the mentally ill have in getting access to treatment in this country, and the ease with which they can procure a deadly weapon — both pressing issues that will no doubt be pushed quickly into the background again.

Historically, many of our assassins — John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz, the radical Puerto Rican nationalists who tried to kill Truman — have stated specific political motives for their deeds. But attempts on the lives of public figures rarely seem to correspond directly to hate speech. Even in the 1960s and ’70s, a time rife with extremist rhetoric, the killers and would-be killers of Martin Luther King Jr., John and Robert Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Malcolm X and George Wallace appear to have been motivated as much by other agendas — a sense of personal failure, a need for recognition, a general aimlessness, delusions of grandeur, the instructions of cult leaders — as they were by any specific ideas of revolution or reaction.

Major public figures aside, though, many others have borne the cost of thuggish prattle about resorting to arms. Dozens of civil rights workers were murdered in the 1960s as a direct result of hate speech. Since 1995, we’ve witnessed the mass slaughter at Oklahoma City, along with the killings of abortion providers, police officers and others at the hands of those who were just doing what the voices on the radio — not in their heads — told them to do. Isn’t that enough?