I’m trying to make sense of the Knoxville, TN church shooting on Sunday. According to news reports, Jim D. Adkisson, burst into a Unitarian church killing two people and wounding six others.

Apparently what drove Adkisson to commit murder was his hatred of the “liberal movement”, which he blamed for his own state of unemployment. Adkisson had also received a letter from the state of Tennessee informing him that his welfare benefits would soon be cut or eliminated.

Adkisson “stated that he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that 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 the major media outlets,” according to the police report. Adkisson ”could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement,” so he chose instead to ”target those that had voted them in to office.”

A Knoxville News report yesterday revealed that inside Adkisson’s home investigators found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” ghostwritten on behalf of Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by Bill O’Reilly. Are these hate mongers responsible? Not directly at least. None of them told Adkisson to pull the trigger. I can’t help feeling however, that Adkisson’s reading list must have had an impact on him.

Maybe Adkisson is just the first in a new onslaught of pathetic losers who blame liberals and the media for their problems. The kind of wretched nutjobs who are so easily manipulated by talk radio and the trash churned out by right wing “pundits.” Savage and his ilk certainly have to be aware that they are inciting lunatics like Adkisson, the ones who turn to violence as their only option.

Is this what the right wing means when they say that an Obama victory will make America less safe? A new upsurge in homegrown terrorism of the kind we experienced the 90’s? Think Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Waco, Ruby Ridge, abortion clinic bombings and murdered doctors.