He made himself a millionaire by the unsheathed swords of his words and today he died by the sword that he’d been okay with–for others.

I don’t care how hateful he got paid to be, shooting him was devastating to the entire country no matter any political party. We don’t want to be this. We don’t want his kids growing up without their daddy. We don’t want his wife to be the widow she now is. We absolutely don’t want more of this violence in response; for those with the memories, one 1960s is enough to have lived through.

Were there retaliatory threats after the shootings of the Democratic Minnesota lawmakers? There were not. There was profound grief.

And today that’s the whole of it. Profound grief.

Where I differed with the one killed is that I believe it IS the guns, stupid, having lived through an age when gun culture was very very different from what it is now and knowing we can have regulations and that those have, in the past, been fine by the then-Supreme Court. And Congress.

The guy they initially held because he said he was confessing to it? That was a Republican who claimed he’d shot the Republican. A relative of mine who ran for office there said that every time there was any official Republican anything in that district, that man showed up and tried to get attention for being there while clearly not being all there.

But the real crazy guy was whoever out there thought that choosing to be the absolute worst of America would somehow bring forth the best in America.