He Did What?

 

Of all the details that have emerged from Arizona this past weekend, this leapt out at me this morning:

Last summer, Ms. Giffords’s Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, had a campaign event in which voters were invited to “shoot a fully automatic M-16” with him to symbolize his assault on her campaign.

There is one word for this kind of worship of gun violence: sick. There are two very powerful and competing notions of conservatism at play here: one is about violence; the other is about non-violence. And the reaction on the right so far suggests they have not the slightest notion that there is anything wrong about their fixation on physical force.