Sarah Palin reacted to the passage of the health-care reform last year by issuing a Unites States map showing districts of 20 Democratic House members who'd voted for the law and who she was targeting for defeat in the midterm elections last November. On the map, the targeted districts were indicated by icons that resembled gun sights — crosshairs.
In announcing her campaign to unseat these 20 Dems, she created a little controversy by using violent rhetoric. "Don't Retreat," Palin urged her followers. "Instead — RELOAD!"
One of those crosshairs was on the district of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Democrat from Tucson, Ariz., who was shot through the head at an event in her district today.
Six people were killed, including a nine-year-old girl, a Giffords staffer and U.S. District Judge John Roll. Twelve people, including Giffords, were wounded.
The alleged shooter Jared Loughner, 22, has been arrested. As of late this afternoon, Giffords was recovering from emergency surgery.
Soon after Rep. Giffords was shot, Palin's people issued a statement on Facebook. Via Glynnis MacNicol at Business Insider's The Wire:
"Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."
On the tragedy in Arizona
My sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today's tragic shooting in Arizona.
On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.
- Sarah Palin
Meanwhile, apparently, other members of Palin's staff were busy scrubbing the website that had featured the "target" map, according to Rob Warmowski at Huffington Post:
In the minutes following the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and members of her staff, the website operated by Sarah Palin that illustrated Gifford's 8th district with gun crosshairs drawn on a map was scrubbed from the internet.
The site, TakeBackThe20.com, was operating normally at 1:07 CST when I connected to obtain an image of the crosshairs map:
[1] View image
When I connected approximately one hour later at 2:10 PM, the site had been replaced with a webserver error, meaning that the webserver was answering but that the content upon it an hour earlier was not being served
[2] View image
Later, at approximately 2:45 PM, the server could no longer be reached at all. Clicks to it met with a DNS error, meaning that any clicks to TakeBackThe20.com would not find an underlying IP address.
[3] View image
While material on the site including the aformementioned map can be found elsewhere on Facebook and Twitter and other web sites, at press time, no image of the site was found in The Internet Archive at archive.org.
During the campaign, the campaign of Jesse Kelly, the Republican endorsed by Palin to run against Gifford, released this blurb inviting voters to an event:
"Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."
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