Judge John Roll (RIP) was threatened last year

It's too soon, and too sensitive, yes. But I'm getting two fairly strong and clear impressions of this case.

The first and most important is that the suspected shooter, Jared Loughner, seems not to have been in his right mind at all. In such a situation, calling this a straight-up "political assassination" doesn't seem quite right to me; the political motives can get so tangled up in a deranged person's mind that they don't get expressed in a way a normal person can understand.

(An analogous situation might be the Fort Hood shootings: Were they "terrorism", or the work of a clearly deranged invididual? Were they a political act, or a result of personal insanity?)

But I think this also may well be relevant:

In February, when U.S. District Judge John Roll presided over a $32 million civil-rights lawsuit filed by illegal immigrants against an Arizona rancher, the Marshals Service was anticipating the fallout.

When Roll ruled the case could go forward, Gonzales said talk-radio shows cranked up the controversy and spurred audiences into making threats.

In one afternoon, Roll logged more than 200 phone calls. Callers threatened the judge and his family. They posted personal information about Roll online.

"They said, 'We should kill him. He should be dead,' " Gonzales said.

Roll, who is the chief federal judge in Arizona, said both he and his wife were given a protection detail for about a month.

"It was unnerving and invasive. . . . By its nature it has to be," Roll said, adding that they were encouraged to live their lives as normally as possible. "It was handled very professionally by the Marshals Service."

So, here's where I come down. In this world, there are crazy people. They are a part of life; indeed, they are a part of political life -- as practically anyone who has gone door-knocking for political campaigns can tell you. Crazy people are, in their way, normal.

Most of the crazy people are relatively benign -- at least to the public at large. But a few of those crazy people are marginally, almost, not-quite violent to begin with -- in other words, they're looking for an outlet, a mission.

The vast majority of people who listen to overheated rhetoric, from organization meetings, talk radio, friends, church, whatever, know how to process provocation reasonably well. They don't take things too literally; they get their political porn, as it were, and have a cigarette. 

But the very every-dayness, the ordinariness and ubiquity of crazy people is precisely why a decent person doesn't use inciting, provocative, violent language.  I do not think that putting little "crosshairs" on a Congressperson's district (for instance) represents an actual incitement to assassination; but given the wide variety of human nature, it is very definitely a bad, bad idea. You should know better -- because there might be someone out there who doesn't.

These words, from a Tea Party activist, seem wise to me:

 "I've given many speeches to my group and at different events in my area, and in doing so I'm very conscious of who's listening," he said. "When I look out at the crowd, 99 percent of the people I see are just like me -- average every day Americans who want constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, things of that nature. Every once in a while, though, I see someone -- how should I put it? -- who is getting too excited, who seems a little farther on the fringe...I realized I had to tone down my comments a little bit, less yelling and screaming and more educational."

I don't really think this is a left-right issue; there have been other eras and places where the shoe has been on the other foot. Again, it's a question of where the sane people set the limits of discussion.