Apparently that's one of the things that motivated Jim David Adkisson to fire a shotgun into a Tennessee church. This is one way to deal with the problem of factions (not Madison's but he's dead and gone).
According to the affidavit requesting to search Adkisson's home, the suspect told investigators liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country. Adkisson also blamed Democrats for the country's decline, according to the affidavit.
"He felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets," the affidavit said. "Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement ... he would then target those that had voted them into office."
The church he fired into, the Unitarian-Universalist Church, tends to swing to the left, and had declared itself to be "gay friendly" in its advertisements. CNN states that this may be prosecuted as a hate crime, but news sources seem to suggest Adkisson was just angry guy.
Now questions will be raised about whether his behavior has somehow been fueled by overheated ideological rhetoric. If so, it might be interesting to speculate about how culpable sources of this rhetoric might be for these actions. We just covered the concept of fighting words in 2301 and toyed with where the line might be drawn between speech that merely conveys a belief and speech that sets action in motion.
In the short term I can see introspection about whether the low quality of political speech in this country is to blame and ought to be modified, but the unworkability of any solution, along with the sheer enjoyment and ease of spewing hate will likely win out in the end. This is human nature after all.
This post from belief.net points out that the format of the internet itself--anonymous, brief, superficial--lends itself to childish superficiality. Perhaps technology is to blame.
