To Clarify

The point is not that Sarah Palin, or any other named Republican politician, actually wanted to kill Gabriel Giffords, or any other Democrats. There are a lot of Republican politicians; some of those who talked the most about Second Amendment remedies may actually have had violent desires themselves, I don't know. But that is not the point. Most of them probably didn't. What they did have was what you might call a certain depraved indifference to the consequences of using this kind of rhetoric. When you talk about "don't retreat--reload!", when you talk about "Second Amendment remedies," when you put up graphics of crosshairs around your political opponents, there are going to be some fringe nutjobs who will listen to that and decide, hey, my political leaders want me to go assassinate Democrats. It will make a difference at the margins. It will result in more assassination attempts, more political violence. It will result in human tragedy. You are playing with fire, and people are going to get burned. The willingness to play with that fire, even in the absence of a personal desire to inflict violence on your political opponents, is the point, because the result is the same either way.