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Thursday, August 14, 2008

I'm losing my job too, but that doesn't mean I'm going to shoot somebody
Posted by Jill | 9:44 AM
I don't even WANT to shoot somebody. I'm not even angry. When you work on grants, you have a job as long as there are grants. No grants, no job. Very simple. No, it isn't fun, and yes, it's scary, and it'll be scarier after August 29 when I am no longer on payroll. But it's nobody's fault, though I suppose I could point to the Republican goal to drown government in the bathtub and its impact on funding for the National Institutes of Health, which is from whence most of the grant money that paid me originated. The 2008 Bush Budget increased NIH funding by 1.1%, when the cost of medical research increases by 5-6% a year and following years of increased funding.

But it is what it is, and my priority right now is not finding scapegoats but to find another job. Because scapegoats won't pay the bills.

But for all that there is a tie, however tenuous you might think it is, between Republican policies and the funding decreases that have indirectly led to the elimination of my job, that doesn't mean I'm going to go track down a Republican party leader and shoot him.

But that seems to be at least part of the rationale driving Timothy Dale Johnson, the man who shot and killed Arkansas Democratic Party chair Bill Gwatney yesterday:

Police said Timothy Dale Johnson, 50, of Searcy, barged into Bill Gwatney's office on Wednesday and shot him multiple times. There were no signs that Gwatney and Johnson, who was later shot dead by officers, knew each other.

A Target retail store in Conway had fired Johnson early Wednesday because he had written graffiti on a wall, police said. Before noon, Johnson was in Gwatney's office in Little Rock with a handgun.

"He said he was interested in volunteering, but that was obviously a lie," said Sam Higginbotham, a 17-year-old volunteer at the party's headquarters.

After the shooting, Johnson sped away in a truck, stopped seven blocks away at the Arkansas State Baptist Convention and pointed a gun at the building's manager, police said. When asked what was wrong, the gunman said "I lost my job," according to Dan Jordan, the church group's business manager.

Officers chased the suspect to Sheridan, 30 miles south of Little Rock. After avoiding spike strips and a roadblock, the suspect emerged from his truck and began shooting at deputies and state troopers, who returned fire. Johnson later died at a hospital. Police found two guns in the truck.

Little Rock police Lt. Terry Hastings didn't say what the men discussed after Johnson entered Gwatney's office but said it was not a heated exchange.

"They introduced themselves, and at that time he pulled out a handgun and shot Chairman Gwatney several times," he said.


It sounds increasingly that Johnson was just a disturbed individual with too-easy access to guns, who was fired for cause rather than being a casualty of Bushonomics.

But in the larger picture, the incident makes me wonder if, as the job base continues to degrade and more and more people lose their homes to foreclosure, we're going to start seeing more of this. Americans have deluded themselves for years that if your values are in the right place and you work hard, you'll succeed. We continue to believe this even in the face of outsourcing, mass layoffs, and skyrocketing executive salaries combined with diminished executive accountability. Republicans have made hay for decades out of the "laziness" of those who can't find work. But if the potential working population is essentially twenty pounds of dung trying to squeeze into a ten-pound bag of available jobs, some are going to be left behind. And for those, perhaps it's time to stop blaming the victim and lionizing those who are behind the erosion of American jobs.

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