I was in Utah when the Tucson killings happened. I had been reading a front-page article in the Salt Lake City Tribune about the Utah Minutemen and their fellow travelers. The article described the Minutemen’s attempts to “defend” Utah from illegal immigrants, which, the article estimated, was only about four percent of Utah’s population. So the Minutemen turn out to be hysterics. Given what was happening in Tucson, they would have been more effective at defense if they had focused on eliminating guns, not illegal immigrants.

I conflate Utah and Arizona, which lies on Utah’s southern border. They are both part of the land-locked west. The scenery is gorgeous, whether in the desert or the mountains. But I’ve had bad experiences there that told me it was easy for a crazy guy with a gun to incorporate the miasma of anti-government vitriol into his deranged mind and act on it.

On one Arizona visit, I walked out of a dinner party in which our hosts, a dentist and his wife, began to reveal bigotry that was out of a Herman Wouk novel from the late 1930s. I had never encountered people like that. Continue reading →