The shooter lists the Communist Manifesto among his favorite books. This is hardly Palin and Beck teritory. Among the killed was one of the most conservative judges in Arizona.

Crazy Schizophrenics do Crazy things. Its what they do. Its because they are crazy.

The actions of those who leap on every thing a crazy schizophrenic does to try to turn it to partisan advantage, though, are harder to justify. The best that could be said for some of them, is a tendency to overwhelming confirmation bias. Of course, those who are revealing their bias that all who disagree with them are crazy, should contemplate themselves, perhaps.

Imagine a civilizational crisis. War, Famine, Disease, whatever. How will we recover without Britannica and its peers. The renaissance was sparked by the rediscovery of ancient books. If we lose technolgoy, how would we ever recover digitial records? A CD or DVD is a nearly magical device, with assumption piled on techniology atop compression algorithm, with healthy amounts of assumptions about scan rates and directions tossed in.

Wikipedia will be, not surprisingly, off-line.

The last print Britannica might be the last back-up check point for our civilization.