The Sane Assassin

To see just how crazy Jared Loughner is, it's useful, by way of contrast, to look at the Wikipedia page about Volkert van der Graaf, the leftist Dutch legal professional who assassinated anti-immigration Prime Minister candidate Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Here are excerpts:

During a second "pro forma" hearing on November 4, it was decided that the trial would be delayed while Van der Graaf was sent for seven weeks of psychiatric observation at the Pieter Baan Center, starting in the first week of January 2003.

In a press statement of November 23 the prosecution (Public Ministry) announced that Van der Graaf had confessed to the murder. He said that he planned it for some time beforehand and that nobody else was involved in the plans or knew about them. He said he saw Fortuyn as a steadily increasing danger for vulnerable groups in society. It was thereby a combination of Fortuyn's stigmatising views, the polarising way that he presented them and the great political power that Fortuyn was threatening to obtain. He saw no other possibility for himself than to end the danger by killing Fortuyn.

... The report from the PBC was complete by about March 21. It found that Van der Graaf could be held completely accountable for the killing. The report also stated that Van der Graaf had an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which explains his rigid moral judgements. Menno Oosterhoff, a child psychiatrist from Groningen, publicly suggested that the Pieter Baan Centrum may have overlooked the possibility that Van der Graaf has Asperger syndrome. Oosterhoff later withdrew his theory. The PBC report stated that nothing could be said about the chance of another similar crime occurring, since the disorder had nothing to do with the murder. Van der Graaf agreed that he was accountable and that he had compulsive urges. The outcome of the investigation ensured that he would receive a prison sentence and not "TBS treatment".

... During the trial, Van der Graaf described again his reasons for killing Fortuyn. He said how he had hoped that the leaders of other political parties would deliver substantial critique on Fortuyn, but that it never happened. Instead, Fortuyn had the talent to channel criticism so that it never touched him. He said again that he had never spoken to anybody else about his plan to act against Fortuyn, and only made a definitive plan to act on the day before the murder. He said that he was wrestling with feelings of regret for the killing, finding the killing of somebody morally reprehensible, but that on May 6 he had felt himself justified, wanting to fight the danger of Fortuyn, not his person. He explained that his lack of outward emotion was due to being somebody who didn't find it easy to talk about feelings. Asked about the danger of accidentally injuring somebody other than Fortuyn in the attack, he said that he had been confident that that wouldn't happen. ...

To the argument that Fortuyn would have been chosen through democratic means, Van der Graaf said that that was also the case for Hitler. Indeed he compared the rise of Fortuyn to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.^[1] In his final argument he said that he had acted from his conscience, but that didn't justify it, and that it was absolutely not normal to shoot somebody to death.

Van der Graaf also said he murdered Fortuyn to defend Dutch Muslims from persecution. He claimed his goal was to stop Fortuyn from targeting "the weak parts of society to score points" and exploiting Muslims as "scapegoats" in an attempt to seek political power.^[3][4][5]

Basically, this guy just took seriously the stuff the EuroEstablishment had been saying about Fortuyn. Hell, some of the elites kept saying that Fortuyn had it coming even after Van der Graaf had gone and done it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer