I was surprised too:

Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible that we’ve all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner.
To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.

I applaud the general sentiment.

On an unrelated note, I’ve already seen the tone of the conversation over Jared Loughner’s despicable crime shift. The more we learn about his mental universe — see Peter Suderman’s coverage at Reason — the more implausible are some of the casual claims that had been advanced immediately after the massacre about his political proclivities, and how the broader climate might have shaped his views. My underinformed gut instinct tells me that Loughner was an erratic young man with a heightened sense of his importance. When Giffords was appropriately dismissive towards one of his nonsensical questions at a public gathering, bursting his bubble of self-regard, he grew obsessed with doing her harm.

And so I’m now hearing that Loughner’s motivations were immaterial, and that, for whatever reason, the “real issue” is the fact that many residents of Arizona want to use mostly symbolic, poorly-crafted legislation to discourage unauthorized migrants from settling in their state, and/or that Michelle Bachmann often employs needlessly salty language. I can’t say that this strikes me as a sensible view.