By now you’ve heard the news: Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot point blank, in the head, at a “Congress On Your Corner” event in Tucson. Whether she will live or die, no one knows yet. What we do know is that all of this is occurring more or less on schedule, early in the third year of a Democratic Presidency.

Go back to the first term of the Clinton Presidency, and you’ll see it all there too: a bitterly disappointed Right wing, led by its loudest talk radio mouths, drastically stepped up its violent rhetoric, its ominous references to the Second Amendment, and its practical advice on how to confront the Liberals who were taking away America.

And then, on April 17th, 1995, Timothy McVeigh put it all into practice.

In other words, give the Patriot movement or the Tea Party (or whatever you want to call the atavistic, gun-worshipping fringe of the Republican Party) about two years or so to soak in the violent imagery of their idols, and you can expect this sort of thing, like clockwork.

And of course, now we should expect a raft of articles and op-eds saying as much, followed, as night follows day, by an even stronger counter-wave of articles and op-eds denying any connection between guns and violence, anti-government calls to arms and actual use of same.

But just take a listen to this snippet from the 2009 debate between the then-hapless candidates for the Chair of the RNC. Each eager to outdo the other, in public display of gun fetishism, the scene was repeated at the more recent RNC Chair debate held a few weeks back. There the exchange was won by a high-haired woman from the West who claimed not just rifles, but assault weapons.