Of course he smirked

Jared Lee Loughner got just what he wanted and everybody, including me at this very moment, helped him get it.  He wanted to send a message and that he did.  In his eyes, he's not throwing his life away because killing people is exactly the reason God put him on this earth.  No matter what we do to him now doesn't really matter.  His name is everywhere and we're all talking about him(until something just as interesting captures our short attention spans).  We've put him up there with the worst of the worst and made what he did brutally glamorous.  I'm counting each day (day # 2) where the Today Show greedily keeps his name in their opening stories or he's on the top of the CNN.com headlines.  Of course we all want to know what kind of monster did this so we can make ourselves feel better, convincing each other that we are completely opposite of him.  I just wish though, that we could live in a world where you'd hide Loughner's face and keep it simple.  He killed several people, he's going to jail for the rest of his life, the end.  Like the rules at a baseball game where they don't show the streaker's face.  This isn't the first time this will happen and unfortunately it won't be the last.  You can interview witnesses all you want but we've heard it all before.  You can run heroic stories but they will be forgotten.  Can you remember any of those 911 heroic stories?  Pretty vague in my mind too.  Positive stories will take a backseat, being stored conveniently in the small print at the bottom of the page or in an afterthought during Ann Curry's news segment.  But not to worry, by the time Loughner is ass murdered in jail for killing a nine year old girl and Giffords is awake and living her life with a severe speech impediment, this story won't even be googleable.