Gabrielle Giffords' Alleged Shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, Was Just As Crazy As You'd Think

The video below comes from the Youtube account of classitup10, aka Jared Lee Loughner: YouTube - Classitup10's Channel. Loughner is the man who allegedly shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords today in Arizona. The Democratic Rep. is in critical condition after surgery: as many as 6 others were killed.



Loughner introduces himself above and something he calls "conscience dreaming," which is "the greatest inspiration for my political business information."

Loughner may have been politically motivated, yes, but he was also just plain crazy, based on a look at his videos. This is a still from the video above that should handily illustrate that:

(Loughner's name was given out as "Laughner" by some members of the press.)

EDIT:

This is a screencap from Loughner's Youtube page, which lists among other things his favorite books: "Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno."

Loughner's perfectly normal book selections will doubtless be ignored due to his also listing Hitler's Mein Kampf.

I'm still looking at his Youtube account and may update this post as I go.

It's inevitable that Loughner's act will be politicized--has already been politicized. I assumed he might be an especially insane right-winger. It's just as likely, the more I think about it, that he was more crazy than anything, and his politics could be defined as "fringe" for the left or the right. Swing far enough around the political spectrum on either side, you eventually collide in crazy land.

As an (attempted) assassin and mass murderer, this may put Loughner more in league with past killers like John Hinckley, who shot Reagan, and Charles Whitman, the ex-Marine who killed a number of victims from a campus bell tower at a Texas university in the late 1960s. Whitman's behavior may have been influenced by a brain tumor that caused him to behave erratically.