If Sarah Palin hadn’t published that crosshair map would Jared Lee Loughner not have killed anyone? I don’t know. He was clearly mentally disturbed (see his Youtube videos). His rhetoric includes Tea Party-esque references to the constitution and gold-backed currency, but it doesn’t seem like it would take much to justify murder in his head. His motivations don’t seem so much to do with health care as with fantasies of literal, sci-fi-like government mind control. He seems to take equal political instruction from Animal Farm as from Alice in Wonderland. If someone’s looking for something to point at the right for it’s the fact that more comprehensive national health care would have probably caught Loughner’s mental illness earlier on and treated it before he became violent.

Emotional appeals, violent metaphor, and inflammatory rhetoric certainly do a lot of harm by encouraging people to leave reason at the door, but let’s not get carried away ourselves and draw causal links where other explanations are sounder.