Oh, wait. We can’t say “trigger.” That’s now defined as violent rhetoric. So please allow us to amend our headline so that it neither offends the innocent nor motivates the insane. How about:
“Call us armchair psychiatrists, but we think we’ve stumbled upon Jared Loughner’s motivation.”
There. That’s better. Much better. There’s certainly nothing dangerous nor threatening in that sentence. So now that our headline has been politically corrected, let’s proceed with our exposé.
Call us slow (you’ve certainly called us worse), but we just realized that the call letters of the ABC-TV affiliate in Tucson are KGUN.
That means every time they do a station identification on the hour and half hour, they use violent rhetoric by spelling the word G-U-N. Gun. A firearm. A personal weapon of mass destruction. A mindless, heartless instrument of death.
Sarah Palin and her little crosshairs pale in comparison to this subliminal message. This television station is clearly, solely responsible for young Jared Loughner’s actions. Just imagine what life must have been like for a lad who grew up in Tucson hearing the constant repetition of this irresponsible station’s violent call letters for 22 years. We contend that this is what finally drove young Jared Loughner over the edge. If, as liberals say, the mere sight of crosshairs is enough to incite violence, what must the gun-gun-gun drumbeat have done to the lad?
But wait. Why hasn’t anyone in the mainstream media mentioned these call letters until now? They blamed Sarah Plain. They blamed Rush Limbaugh. They blamed Glenn Beck. They blamed the Tea Party. They blamed common images on a lightly-visited website. But we’ve neither heard nor seen KGUN blamed on the nightly network newscasts nor trumpeted in the New York Times.
Is it really possible that an army of Fourth Estate types from around the world descended on Tucson and yet not one of them ever noticed that the call letters of the local ABC-TV affiliate contain the word GUN? Is it really possible that the same people who were perceptive enough to recognize the danger of showing crosshairs on a website Jared Loughner had probably never visited were not perceptive enough to notice that a station he grew up watching uses the word GUN every time it identifies itself? Is it really possible that they believe that Palin’s crosshairs image was powerful enough to set off Loughner’s psychosis, but were simultaneously able to ignore KGUN’s blatant call to violence?
Or was there, perhaps, an agenda that led them to attack Palin et al while simultaneously protecting one of their own?
For the sake of Tucson’s future, for the sake of Tucson’s safety, for the sake of Tucson’s troubled youth, we demand that KGUN change it’s call letters immediately. We hope you’ll join us in this effort.
Also see our companion article, “We suggest some alternate call letters and slogans for Tucson television station KGUN.”
