"The shooter was a registered Republican."
"The shooter donated via ActBlue to progressive causes."
"The shooter was 'definitely a conservative'."
American partisans are rushing to paint a narrative where the would-be assassin on Sat 13 Jul 2024 belongs to the other side.
But they're failing to see that he fits into a well-established trend in modern American culture - a trend not of political violence but of gun violence.
After the shooter fired his dad's rifle 3 times, killing one person and injuring three more, including the Republican Presidential candidate, the impulse was to label it a political assassination - as if he wanted to murder the former president to change the trajectory of politics. Yet as of today the shooter left no evidence of clear political motivations or affiliations. Sure, he was a registered republican, but he also donated to Democrats shortly after the attempted coup on Jan 6th. He didn't leave a political manifesto. There were no group chats of him trying to organize a group of armed gunmen to kidnap members of the government. He hasn't been training with firearms and explosives in militia groups. Rather, he acted alone, after showing an interest in firearms, and after killing and hurting other people he only succeeded in getting himself killed.
This picture is far more consistent with the everyday (I'm sorry to say...) shootings in America: the high schools, the cinemas, the churches, the shopping malls. It's yet another random act of violence committed by a young man, or a lost boy 1, scarcely out of childhood, who failed to "thrive" - that is, to find some productive place where they were accepted by society - and eventually resorted to the last refuge of the incompetent to try to make a name for themselves. Their motivation isn't so much political as it is a mix of nihilism and narcissism, vengeance at imagined grieves and victim-hood of imagined slights.
Apart from the shooter's political affiliations, so many of the questions after the attempt were around the Secret Service: how could they allow someone to get so close to the former President? How could they not respond to reports from audience members that someone was on the rough with a gun? How could they not stop him while he was slowly crawling into position on a hot tin roof? All of these questions are justifiable. But after so many years of mass shooting events for nihilistic reasons, how come no one is asking why America has so many young men drifting around with nihilistic, narcissistic, and violent tendencies ?
And how come that, when these lost boys fail to find a place for themselves in society, does that same society want to defend their right to have a gun?