While everyone was handwringing about political violence after the shooting last week-end, I wrote that for Salon. Days and days of lugubrious moaning about “changing the tone” and “bringing down the temperature” later:
I wanted to flag to your attention another data point that suggests that reader of ours was on to something when he posited that Tom Crooks, 20 year old who tried to shoot Donald Trump, was more in the line of school shooters and mass shooters than political assassins as we’ve conventionally understood them. CNN now reports that Crooks had been googling information about Ethan Crumbley, a 2021 school shooter, who’s parents were later prosecuted over his murders. Indeed, the FBI seems to be quite literally moving toward this theory of Tom Crooks’ murders.
Quoting CNN: “One emerging theory by investigators, based in part on the timing and subjects of his online searches, is that the shooter was looking to carry out a mass shooting and that the Trump event’s proximity and timing offered the most ready opportunity.”
This is a pretty extraordinary interpretation of the events of one week ago and it matches very closely with what TPM Reader GS surmised the morning after the events. This theory from investigators suggests not simply that Crooks profile matched the sociology and ideation of school/mass shooters but perhaps that he was quite literally planning a mass shooting and the Trump rally, which was announced ten days in advance, simply provided a ready venue for it. I confess even I have some difficulty quite getting my head around this idea. But there it is. And it suggests that rather than some climate of persecution by which “they” – some fuzzy reference to the vast collective of Trump opposition – tried to kill him, as Republicans are now universally claiming, Trump may have fallen victim to the mass shooting/school shooting culture gun rights activists have done so much to foster.
The minute we found out it was a lone 20 year old gun nut who’d been bullied in school, there was a good chance this was what it was.