Doug Mataconis · · 4 comments

Notwithstanding the fact that Jared Loughner was clearly living in his own deluded world, it’s worth noting that the woman he targeted had other reasons to be concerned about her safety:

“I was really angry for two to three days. Very, very angry,” [Giffords’ husband Mark] Kelly said. “The first call I received after I arrived at the hospital was President Obama, and I expressed to him … how angry I was.”

“Whom did you blame?” Sawyer asked.

“Initially, I was upset because she’d, you know, received death threats before,” Kelly said, adding that he felt it was “just part of what we’ve been dealing with for the last year.”

He said they had talked “dozens of times” about how “risky” Giffords’ job was.

“She says, you know, ‘Someday I’m really worried that somebody’s going to come up to me at one of these events with a gun,'” Kelly said.

Sawyer asked, “Do you still think the climate in this country had anything to do with it?”

“I don’t. It certainly didn’t cause this,” Kelly said. “It didn’t cause Jared Loughner to, you know, to plan this attack. … I think you have somebody that’s really, really disturbed, possibly schizophrenic.”