Nate Silver doesn't jump to any assigned blame for Tucson. But in the debate between which "side" is more violent or more prone to lash out with firearms, Nate presents this:
The journalist Ronald Kessler, meanwhile, wrote in his bestselling book that there has been a 400 percent increase in the number of threats against the White House since Barack Obama took office.
These sorts of statistics are a bit frightening. But they do, for better or for worse, provide us with a reasonably robust data set. If it turns out, for instance, that Democratic members of Congress are much more likely to receive such threats than Republican ones, that might tell us something meaningful. Likewise, if threats made against Mr. Obama routinely invoke his race, that could tell us something too.
As I noted on the John Phillips Show last night, not all far-right conservatives are violent, militaristic gun-fanatics, but it's much more likely that violent, militaristic gun-fanatics are far-right conservatives. Therefore, pandering to that faction with "second amendment remedy" language is irresponsible, regardless of whether it was directly to blame for Tucson.