We're Arizona shooting victims too, says Tea Party co-founder [View All]

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Source: The Guardian

A nine-year-old girl lies in the morgue. A member of Congress faces a lifetime of struggle to recover from a bullet in the brain. A city is bracing itself for a string of funerals as it tries to fathom the carnage.

But Trent Humphries says there is another innocent victim left by Jared Lee Loughner's killing of six people and wounding of 14 others in his assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. It is his Tea Party movement and, more particularly, his family. The killings, he says, are evolving into a conspiracy to destroy his organisation and silence criticism of the government.

Humphries is the co-founder of Tucson's Tea Party, a movement besieged by accusations that its use of the rhetoric of armed resistance against political opponents played a role in the shootings.

The local sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, quickly pointed the finger at the growing vitriol, hate and anger directed against the government on talk radio and by Tea Party supporters in Arizona, where Democrats and liberals from President Obama to Giffords are portrayed as enemies of the people, un-American or Nazis.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/11/arizona-shootings-tea-party