Editing Jared Lee Loughner (section)

===Political views===
Records show that Loughner was registered as an independent and voted in 2006 and 2008, but not in 2010.

Loughner's high-school friend Zach Osler said, "He did not watch TV; he disliked the news; he didn't listen to political radio; he didn't take sides; he wasn't on the Left; he wasn't on the Right." The tone of Loughner's online writings and videos from immediately before the attack were described by ''The Guardian'' as "almost exclusively conservative and anti-government, with echoes of the populist campaigning of the Tea Party movement".

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Loughner's position that currency not backed by a gold or silver standard is worthless was a "hallmark of the far right and the militia movement." Jesse Walker of the American libertarian magazine Reason expressed deep skepticism at the connections drawn by Potok.

According to a former friend, Bryce Tierney, Loughner had expressed a longstanding dislike for Gabrielle Giffords. Tierney recalled that Loughner had often said that women should not hold positions of power. He repeatedly derided Giffords as a "fake". This belief intensified after he attended her August 25, 2007 event when she did not, in his view, sufficiently answer his question: "What is government if words have no meaning?" Loughner kept Giffords' form letter, which thanked him for attending the 2007 event, in the same box as an envelope which was scrawled with phrases like "die bitch" and "assassination plans have been made". Zane Gutierrez, a friend, later told ''The New York Times'' that Loughner's anger would also "well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government.