First I have to disagree completely with your characterization of it as “…seems to involve petty name calling and ridiculous hyperbole…”. Inviting people to shoot machine guns at photos of their political opponent is not petty or ridiculous, it’s a serious call to violence.

Second, the sort of extremist speech we see is an effective tool. I’m going to touch several third rails here but I believe the only solution lies well outside the realm of laws restricting free speech. Only a change of political and religious leaders will reduce the senseless violence.

Fred Singer. He gave us the whack job argument that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer because you can’t link smoking a specific cigarette to a specific individual getting lung cancer. Mountains of statistical evidence notwithstanding, tobacco companies are free to sell a deadly product because they have cover of “plausible deniability”.

Fred Singer. He gave us the whack job argument that because you can’t trace a specific weather event to human influence on climate, there is no human influence on climate. Mountains of evidence notwithstanding, big oil companies continue to receive generous federal subsidies with full cover in the form of “plausible deniability”

For decades now we’ve heard the Republican party allow its members to repeatedly and openly call doctors “baby killers” and “mass murderers”. Periodically one of the wild-eyed zealot followers picks up a bomb or a gun and commits murder. We get that same Fred Singer excuse – you can’t link their rhetoric directly to the zealot committing the crime, even though statistically it’s obvious that there are zero pro-choice activists killing people and there are dozens if not hundreds of anti-choice activists burning down clinics, killing doctors and nurses and screaming amplified versions of the same rhetoric that originated with/is endorsed by officials at the very highest levels of government.

So now we have an out of control element of American politics who thinks anyone and everyone who dares to disagree with them fair game for mock executions by machine gun, and we have political candidates who either tolerate it or endorse it. Even mainstream Republican presidential candidates had multiple incidents of people shouting out loud that their political rivals committed treason and should be killed.

Where have we heard it before? “You can’t trace my machine gunning portraits of my political rivals to some specific lunatic actually gunning down the person that I was only *pretending* to kill”

There is nothing wrong (from a first amendment perspective) with allowing people to picket the funerals and say that people should die and that a god wants those people to be killed. There will always be lunatics in the world, that’s a fact of life.

What’s wrong is the lack of any serious, sustained response by supposedly responsible political and religious leaders to stop the hate at the source.

Try the shoe is on the other foot. How many politicians of every stripe have blamed Muslim leaders for violence specifically because those governments/leaders allow fundamentalist hate speech to go unchecked?

What would the reaction of the tea baggers and Christian religious leaders be to a Muslim pointing his AK47 at a portrait of Sarah Palin as part of his election campaign?

They would of course, endorse the man for high public office, wouldn’t they?

US politicians and religious leaders have a standard response whenever they’re called on their own wink-wink nod-nod version of hate speech: “We don’t endorse that weed, we only planted the seeds and watered them a little bit whenever election time comes around. You can’t possibly blame us for it getting out of control in a few places”.

There is ample evidence that “plausible deniability” works well. It’s not free speech that’s the problem, it’s political and religious speech (or lack thereof) that’s the problem.