This week's Political Gab Fest was recorded before a live audience on Wednesday, January 12th at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for the 14th of January. I'm John Dickerson here with Emily Bazelon and David Plotz.

We are at the historic Sixth and I synagogue, and we are here not just by ourselves, but we've

brought a whole, well, we haven't brought them, but we've asked them to the con.

And they're all out in the audience, and hopefully they're going to let us know that they are

here and exist by making some sort of audible noise.

So that...

Our first question will be, can you make a noise that's not audible?

Anyway, the topics today will be, the first topic will be this horrible shooting that took place over the weekend in Tucson, Arizona.

Our second topic will be politics in the wake of that shooting and the reaction to it.

And then our third topic will be about a book called Battle Him of the Tiger Mother,

which is a book that's getting a lot of discussion and comment and controversy and all of it

to the delight of the publisher, I'm sure. And we've talked about it a lot three times today,

and every time we've started talking about it, we've had to quiet each other down

so that we can save it for here. So hopefully it will be worth all of that pent-up desire to talk.

But let's start in Tucson. On Saturday, Jared Loeffner started shooting outside of a safeway,

and he wounded 14 people, including Congressman Gabrielle Giffords.

He also killed six people, one of them a federal judge, one of them a nine-year-old girl.

The president will be speaking at the end of our, probably, about the time we're done here

tonight in his visit to a memorial there. And in addition to being just a horrible act, it's started a round of

debate about the level of political conversation in our country, violence, guns, and whether

any of it had any relationship to the actions of the gunmen. So I want to start with you,

...