Tears and recriminations in Tucson

On the street corner just outside Gabrielle Giffords' constituency office, a helium balloon slips its moorings and zigzags into the dusk sky.

Passengers on a bus turn all at once, faces pressed against the windows to glimpse the scene: flickering candles, flowers and stuffed toys cram the pavement in the immediate vicinity.

Grief is a unifying force. Two days after the shooting that gravely injured the congresswoman and killed six others, Tucson residents are coming to this spot in a steady flow, to say their prayers privately, to add their own offerings to the roadside shrine or to write down their thoughts on a slip of paper provided before dropping it in a message box in the hope Giffords will soon be well enough to read it.

The emotions of everybody here are an open book. They are in mourning even if Giffords herself is still alive.

Neil Brandon, 56, has wet cheeks and holds a photograph of his wife, Hang Pham, embracing the congresswoman when she showed up at the Raytheon weapons plant where they worked to support a strike in 2007.

"I am just sad is all I can say," Brandon says, a finger wiping an eye.

President Barack Obama is due here, but the time for politics is not now, because politics are partly to blame. Aren't they?

Everyone on the corner of Swan and Pima seems eager to believe that to be the case, that the nasty politics of Giffords' re-election campaign here last year and the incendiary rhetoric of commentators and some national leaders are somehow to blame for what happened.

Is that the feeling of everyone in the city and in the state? Not if you scrape a little deeper. Or listen to talk radio.

Take Donna, who called in yesterday to the Jim Parisi show on KBOI Radio, The Voice. How wonderful to see Democrats and Republicans coming together for the swearing-in of the new state legislator, she says. That's unity we need. But there is just one thing she wants to add. How about that sheriff?

That would be Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who, after the shooting, not only agreed that the coarsening of political discourse was part of the problem, but then suggested it was especially so in Arizona, a state that had "become the Mecca of prejudice and bigotry".

While he was at it, Dupnik, a Democrat, rehearsed the case for stronger gun laws in the state that he called "the Tombstone of the United States" - a reference to the gun-and-holster justice of the old Wild West.

On talk radio at least, Tucson's grieving has already more or less been pushed aside by argument. And fury. Callers were outraged at the left's suggestion that anyone aside from the suspect himself, Jared Loughner, should be blamed for the atrocity.

"These are the same people who say that video games are to blame for kids who go and commit violent crimes," rages an indignant caller. And the sheriff comes under vigorous attack. "There is just something wrong with a man coming out and saying such nasty things about our state," says Donna, one of many to take that view.

The assaults on him are coming now from the state legislature too. Representative Jack Harper, a conservative Republican, says maybe Dupnik should be in the dock over the incident, because he failed to provide protection for the congresswoman.

Minerva Carcano, the United Methodist Bishop of Arizona, says: "Truly, I am very grateful to Sheriff Dupnik for having the courage to address what is happening to our politics across the country. It is our culture that affects the actions of our young people ... and we must recognise it."

The debate must be had, grieving or no grieving. With that, she folds the message slip she has just completed, drops it in the box and turns to go home.

- INDEPENDENT