Patricia Maisch, the 61-year-old woman who grabbed a magazine away from the alleged shooter on Saturday, suggested in an interview with Fox News on Sunday night that hateful rhetoric was in part to blame for the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and the mass shooting which killed six others and left more than a dozen injured.
“The extreme right reporters and radio and TV have added to this problem, and I’m just hoping that will change,” Maisch told Shepard Smith in her first television interview on Fox News on Sunday night. “That’s my hope, is that the Republicans will stop naming bills in very hateful ways, like the job killing whatever the rest of that bill is, I think that the extreme right has just gone too far.”
The politics of Loughner aren’t clear, but he has had a troubled history which included at least five run ins with campus police, a previous arrest on drug charges and a fascination with bizarre conspiracy theory on the government controlling people’s minds with grammar structure.
Maisch, who grabbed a gun clip as two other men tackled alleged shooter Jared Lee Loughner, said she doesn’t consider herself a hero.
“It was just an extra security to get that away from him, but I think the two heroes were the two men who had the courage to knock him down,” Maisch said.
Those larger magazines used by Loughner would have been banned under the federal assault weapons ban which expired in 2004, Justin Elliot writes in Salon. Former senior official at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms James Cavanaugh told NBC’s Michael Isikoff that the assault weapons ban only banned the manufacture of new high-capacity magazines and that those already on the market could still be sold. Cavanaugh said a more relevant issue was the high standard for stopping those who are mentally unstable from purchasing guns.
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