Rick Perlstein | The Nation

Aaron Swartz at a Boston Wikipedia Meetup in 2009. By Sage Ross (Flickr: Boston Wiki Meetup), via Wikimedia Commons.

I had other plans for how to spend my Saturday. I had other plans for my next blog post here at The Nation. Then I learned my friend Aaron Swartz had committed suicide, facing a baseless, bullying federal indictment that might have sent him to jail for decades, and fate demanded this be a day to remember.

The radical left, including the Black Panthers, also contributed to the rise of gun vigilante culture in the United States, a phenomenon that later shifted to the right. (AP.)

A lot of what I hope to be doing with this blog I fear might verge on pedantry. Too much of what we observe today on the right we act as if started the day before yesterday. Always, we need to set the clock back further—as a political necessity. We have to establish deeper provenances. Or else we just reinvent, and reinvent and reinvent the wheel.

Or, in this case, reinvent the assault rifle. Some of the best coverage and reflection on December 14—the day of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary—has come from the outstanding folks at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. And part of the mix over at TPM is its reprinting of e-mails from ordinary readers, offering marvelous worm’s-eye views and analyses of the issues of the day. Sometimes, however, the worm’s-eye view only views what the worm’s eye views. On December 15, as the nature of the fearsome arsenal took inside that first grade classroom—the Bushmaster XM-15, the 10mm Glock SF and 9mm SIG Sauer handgun—was becoming apparent, but before, I think, it had been established that the mother he stole the guns from before murdering her may have been a “full-on” prepper, arming for Armageddon, TPM printed this interesting e-mail from a reader identified as SS: