Free Speech Thought For the Day

I had a little discussion about political rhetoric with a friend of mine on Facebook, a good guy who is concerned that perhaps political speech is getting too heated and needs to be toned down because it might inspire crazy people to crazy acts.  After going back and forth a bit I closed with this:

We'll never be able to make speech safe enough that it can't be misinterpreted by a crazy person.

That's the bottom line to all the calls to tone down the rhetoric. Crazy people don't hear the same things we hear. I say "it's a nice day out today" and the crazy guy hears "maybe I should go shoot up a Safeway". No amount of speech monitoring is going to fix that, and criminalizing speech on the basis that someone might misinterpret it is simply unconstitutional.

And this is interesting:

Most Americans reject the idea that inflammatory political language by conservatives should be part of the debate about the forces behind the Arizona shooting that left six people dead and a congresswoman in critical condition, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.

A 53% majority of those surveyed call that analysis mostly an attempt to use the tragedy to make conservatives look bad. About a third, 35%, say it is a legitimate point about how dangerous language can be.

And there is little sense that stricter gun control laws in Arizona might have averted the tragedy. Only one in five say they would have prevented the shooting; 72% say tighter controls wouldn't have prevented it.

I'd say that any thoughts about new gun control legislation are now officially dead (can I still say "dead"?).