Eve Conant and Claire Mar­tin dig into Jared Lough­n­er’s back­ground, try­ing to explain his mass mur­der. I think the first half the piece is weak, alas, but the sec­ond half is dyna­mite. The first builds on inter­views with his neigh­bors, who say that the 22 year-old liked to walk the streets in a hood­ie with his ear­buds in, and did­n’t respond to greet­ings. That could be a sign of men­tal ill­ness, I sup­pose, or it could mean he’s a dis­af­fect­ed 22 year-old guy who lives with his par­ents and isn’t hap­py about it. If we round­ed up all the guys or gals who wear hood­ies and lis­ten to iPods, we’d have to repop­u­late huge swaths of the Mis­sion and Williamsburg. 

The sec­ond half of the piece inter­views experts who’ve been por­ing over Lough­n­er’s rhetoric, and that’s where things get interesting:

Loughner’s ram­bling Inter­net mis­sives, says Mark Potok of the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter, like­ly come from well known online sources of the rad­i­cal right. Potok, who stud­ies hate groups and hate speech, has combed Loughner’s sites and says his mate­r­i­al on gram­mar, in par­tic­u­lar, like­ly comes from the writ­ings of the Mil­wau­kee-based, far right activist David Wynn Miller. As Potok explains it, Miller “believes in a ‘truth lan­guage’ that can throw off the gov­ern­ment. If you use the right com­bi­na­tion of colons and hyphens you don’t have to pay tax­es. Miller is vir­tu­al­ly the only per­son who push­es these ideas on gram­mar, it’s a very unusu­al idea, even on the rad­i­cal right.” For his part, Miller tells The Dai­ly Beast/Newsweek that Lough­n­er has nev­er reached out to him, but that “I expect he’s been on my web­site… He’s just repeat­ing things I’ve had up on my site the past 11 years.” …

In exam­in­ing Loughner’s list of favorite books, which includes Orwell and Mein Kampf, the South­ern Pover­ty Law Center’s Potok notes that an anti-gov­ern­ment thread runs through all those works. In addi­tion, Loughner’s obses­sion with cur­ren­cy not being backed by gold and sil­ver “is a core idea of the mili­tia, or Patri­ot, movement.” Lough­n­er at one point writes, “My favorite activ­i­ty is con­science dream­ing” and Potok thinks he might mean “conscious dreaming,” an idea par­tic­u­lar­ly per­pe­trat­ed by a British writer David Icke. “The link to Icke, who is an extrem­ist, might be weak, but the basic idea of con­scious dream­ing is impos­si­ble to under­stand but boils down to: what we think is real­i­ty real­ly isn’t. We live in a holo­graph­ic universe,” Potok says. If that is a phi­los­o­phy Lough­n­er had adopt­ed, that might in some ways explain books like “Alice in Won­der­land” and oth­er alter­nate real­i­ty books on his favorite book list. “Most like­ly he is a men­tal­ly ill man who heard a lot of vit­ri­olic rhetoric and start­ed to absorb some of it,” says Potok.

David Icke is known for, among oth­er things, argu­ing that shape-shift­ing rep­til­ians have infil­trat­ed our gov­ern­ment as part of an elab­o­rate plot involv­ing Masons and British roy­al­ty and maybe even Elvis. He appar­ent­ly has quite a fol­low­ing. Gram­mar-obses­sive and self-styled “King of Hawaii” David Wynn Miller claims that Lough­n­er must have been brain­washed by the Air Force.

Moth­er Jones has an exclu­sive inter­view with one of Jared Lough­n­er’s long-time friends, who describes Lough­n­er’s shift from a pot-smok­ing nihilist to an increas­ing­ly with­drawn and obses­sive char­ac­ter. The shift began in high school (where, it should be not­ed, schiz­o­phre­nia often begins to man­i­fest). It caused him to focus on dream­ing, espe­cial­ly the “lucid,” “con­science,” or per­haps con­scious dream­ing described above. Accord­ing to the friend, “Lough­n­er believed that dreams could be a sort of alter­na­tive, Matrix-style real­i­ty, and ‘that when you real­ize you’re dream­ing, you can do any­thing, you can cre­ate any­thing.’ ” It’s almost like Lough­n­er was self-diag­nos­ing a schiz­o­phrenic break from reality.

Lough­n­er quit drink­ing and smok­ing pot in 2008, accord­ing to the friend, but “After he quit, he was just off the wall.” Again, undi­ag­nosed or unin­sured schiz­o­phren­ics often self-med­icate with alco­hol and ille­gal drugs as a way to con­trol their symp­toms, so this isn’t a sur­pris­ing result. In the last cou­ple of years, the friend says Lough­n­er had drift­ed even fur­ther into his dream-world, to the extent that his dreams became “his wak­ing life, his reality.”

Asked why he thinks Lough­n­er did what he did, the friend says: 

“I think the rea­son he did it was main­ly to just pro­mote chaos. He want­ed the media to freak out about this whole thing. He want­ed exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing. He wants all of that.” Tier­ney thinks that Lough­n­er’s mind­set was like the Jok­er in the most recent Bat­man movie: “He fucks things up to fuck shit up, there’s no rhyme or rea­son, he wants to watch the world burn. He prob­a­bly want­ed to take every­one out of their monot­o­nous lives: ‘Anoth­er Sat­ur­day, going to go get groceries’—to take peo­ple out of these norms that he thought soci­ety had trapped us in.”

It’s pos­si­ble, of course, that Lough­n­er’s actions have no ratio­nal expla­na­tion. But as ratio­nal peo­ple, we want more. Why that Sat­ur­day and not some oth­er day? Why Gif­fords and not some­one else? Appar­ent­ly Lough­n­er had been fix­at­ed on a dis­sat­is­fy­ing answer Gif­fords gave Lough­n­er at a pub­lic event some time back, but is that enough expla­na­tion? Moth­er Jones describes Lough­n­er as “ticked off by what he believed to be a per­va­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism” in soci­ety, but it isn’t clear whether that’s the friend’s assess­ment or their own inter­pre­ta­tion of Lough­n­er’s far-from-coher­ent writings.

What we know, then, is that he was prob­a­bly schiz­o­phrenic, which isn’t an expla­na­tion for vio­lence. It does­n’t seem like he was being treat­ed. He had become obsessed with ideas that even fringe thinkers find kind of strange. But that isn’t a pre­dic­tor of vio­lence on its own either. He was unhap­py and iso­lat­ed, appar­ent­ly direc­tion­less. But we still haven’t got some­thing that, even with­in his own irra­tional frame­work, makes sense of Sat­ur­day’s tragedy.