Gary Alan Fine is a Guggenheim Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and teaches at Northwestern University. He is the author of Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial. He considers here a very difficult example of what has been one of his ongoing research concerns. Jeff

Although I feel abashed admitting it, I find my sympathy for Jared Lee Loughner is swelling. Mr. Loughner is, as every sentient American is aware, the young man who pulled the trigger – again and again – killing six, wounding others, including his local Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords in a mall in Tucson, Arizona.

Note that I do not say that he is an accused assassin, killer, or murderer, which legally he certainly is under our rule of law. I am entirely prepared to accept that Mr. Loughner was, last Saturday, a violent man, who deserves whatever a jury or set of juries (both federal and state) will eventually determine. I will not call for parole in 2061. I am also prepared to admit that a court may determine – although it probably will not, given American attitudes – that this young is not fully culpable for his violence because of mental illness.

What I am not prepared to accept is how from the moments after the attack, Mr. Loughner’s identity has been taken from him to be used as a political football by smart people who are willing to be ignorant. Again and again we see that we do not truly care about the self-imagined identity of this 22-year old, but only about what we need for him to be. Perhaps we need him to be a tea party manqué boisterously inspired by Sarah and Rush, perhaps an out-of-control, drug-crazed Goth worshipping at the altar of a skull, perhaps a follower of Hitler or Marx, or perhaps we just need for him to be, as is often stated, “a nut job.” But these are what we need for Mr. Loughner to be, and not what he is. The truth is that Jared, we hardly know you.

So we search through the shards and debris . . .

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