Were the Tucson shootings simply an outcome of a single person?s struggle with mental illness or was the shooter driven – at least in part – by the hostile political climate in the U.S.?
Most likely it was a combination of both those factors and many others. That doesn?t let anyone in the political arena off the hook. But it does highlight the need for a much more nuanced debate than we?ve had so far about this tragedy. Unfortunately, even commentators who tried to reintroduce some reason to the post-shooting debates by pointing to the problem of mental illness did so by offering just another monocausal explanation and relying on the same rhetorical tools that got us to into this mess in the first place. [A column by Dietram A. Scheufele, professor of life sciences communication at UW-Madison]