Arizona, described as 'the Tombstone of the US', has an enduring obsession with guns, writes LARA MARLOWE
THE DAMAGE done to Arizona’s already tattered reputation by an apparently mentally ill gunman who killed six people and wounded 14 others on January 8th is a constant lament here.
“There has been a tradition of confrontation, violence and extremism in Arizona that is hard to deny,” says Terry Goddard, who was the state’s attorney general from 2002 until the beginning of this month.
Goddard, a Democrat, lost his bid to unseat the right-wing governor Jan Brewer in last November’s elections.
Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, lived in Arizona before his crime. One of the 9/11 pilots trained here. “We have a reputation for being a place where people with unusual views can come and not be noticed,” Goddard sighs.
Now Fred Phelps’s tiny Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas, has stepped into the maelstrom. The WBC believes the January 8th atrocity was a sign of God’s dissatisfaction with “sinful” US society.
“Thank God for the shooter,” said a website message asking WBC members to picket the funeral tomorrow of nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, who was, it notes, “raised in the Catholic Pedophile Monster”.
The Arizona Assembly was to consider legislation yesterday banning Phelps’s group from the funerals in Tucson. At an outdoor rally on Monday night, youths handed out pamphlets vowing to stop Phelps and the WBC. The group plans a cordon of counter- protesters wearing large “angel wings” to screen the funeral from picketers.
Following Saturday’s killings, “local politicians, members of the clergy, law-enforcement officials and community leaders called upon all of us to ratchet down the nasty political rhetoric”, EJ Montini noted in the Arizona Republic newspaper. “And the people of Arizona (as we knew they would) responded. By ratcheting up the rhetoric.”
Montini cited numerous readers’ letters. Referring to lapsed attempts by liberals to enact amnesty for illegal immigrants, one reader wrote: “Nothing that happened in Tucson today changes in any way the fact that supporters of Shamnesty are traitors scum.”
It is not uncommon to see people walk into shops or restaurants here carrying guns.
Pima county sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat, has called Arizona “the Tombstone of the US” and said he opposes “letting everybody in the state carry weapons wherever they are”.
The Republican state representative Jack Harper told USA Today: “If he [Dupnik] would have done his job, maybe this doesn’t happen . . . when everyone is carrying a firearm, nobody is going to be a victim. The socialists of today are . . . one gun-confiscation away from being the communists of tomorrow.”
Arizona’s obsession with weapons goes back to the most famous gunfight in US history, at the OK Corral in 1881.
Sheriff Dupnik stands in marked contrast to the Maricopa county sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose arsenal includes a tank and a 50mm armour-piercing machine gun capable of shooting down aircraft. Arpaio’s young acolyte, the Pinal county sheriff Paul Babeu, has invited vigilantes to come to the border to fight drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.
Arizona claims a “Minutemen” militia for the same purpose.
“It’s not uncommon to see people in camp chairs with high- powered rifles trained on the border,” says Goddard, the former attorney general. Several years ago, he and the US attorney filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against a radio station owned by Rupert Murdoch.
A candidate for a job at the station was allowed to talk for hours about putting Arizonans on the border to shoot immigrants.
“He got into discussions about whether they should use spreading bullets or penetrating bullets,” Goddard says. “No action was taken.” Guns are a potent element of political discourse here.
In the November election, Republican businessman Jesse Kelly challenged Gabrielle Giffords, the Democratic congresswoman who was a victim of Saturday’s attack after being shot through the brain.
Kelly brandished an attack weapon in a campaign advertisement about border security.
On Kelly’s website, the motto that endeared him to the right- wing Tea Party, “Limited Government. Fiscal Sanity. Free Market Solutions”, is printed above his message deploring the mass shooting.
Two Arizonans have died as a direct result of governor Jan Brewer slashing $1.2 million in funding for a transplant programme. Senator Russell Pearce, the strongman behind Brewer, believes the family and church – not government – should provide education and healthcare.
Pearce’s campaign against “anchor babies” – US-born offspring of illegal immigrants – has blossomed into a national offensive by conservative legislators from five states who want Congress to end “birthright citizenship” for those born in the US.
In his failed campaign against Brewer, immigration “was the granddaddy of all wedge issues”, Goddard says. He opposed the Senate Bill 1070 on immigration, which Brewer signed last April.
Goddard is the Harvard- educated son of a former governor and has also served as mayor of Phoenix. Brewer holds a GED, the equivalent of a high school diploma. During a televised debate, she giggled when her mind went blank for 16 seconds.
Her poll ratings went up.
Brewer falsely claimed that Mexican drug dealers were leaving headless bodies in the desert. “It increased Arizona’s reputation for violence, that she would talk so openly and flagrantly about something that was a figment of her imagination,” Goddard says.
A judge last summer struck down the most controversial provisions of Senate Bill 1070, including the “papers please” clause that required police to check the identity of anyone who might be an illegal immigrant.
Pearce’s strategy is to appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court, a process that will take years, and in the meantime continue to inflame Arizona politics.