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Latest updates, now that it's spreading around official media outlets: a suspect is wanted, Vance Boelter. He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/14/democratic-lawmakers-minnesota-shot
A man masquerading as a police officer is shooting politicians in their homes. The why is debatable; the theories I see floating around have to do with these two Democrat's recent voting records, and breaking from Dem consensus to support the Republicans. I don't know if this is true, I didn't check their records -- I share only because it's what I heard.
The why is also, I think, insignificant. There are so many reasons to be violent in modern society, if you're not intrinsically against violence itself -- punishing defectors, rallying your side with a show of force, intimidating people and politicians on the margins. I don't care what specific social ill or rage drove this would-be assassin.
More interesting, to me, is that we're seeing assassinations and their attempts more and more. It seems that way to me, at least -- I'm going off vibes and a gut reckoning with the numbers, not a reasoned analysis. Maybe I'm entirely wrong! But the vibe I get is the willingness to use violence on one's enemies is becoming significantly more normalized by the day, and eventually, I suspect, we're going to hit a turning point where no one pretends they don't want the other side dead and we get to it.
I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.
It makes me think. We're materially better off than ever. We're spiritually dead. We have more freedom than ever. We're trapped in our heads like anxious prisons. We solved hunger, and crippled ourselves with food.
We don't build. We don't conquer. We prosper, sort of, the numbers on the charts go up and the useless shit is really cheap -- but the precious things are rarer than ever.
I dunno. Nobody died this time, I guess that's nice. And the future, rough beast that it is, continues to slouch toward Bethlehem.
edit: scratch that two died, I guess that's less nice. RIP.
I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
The success of this fellow and the Luigi fellow re-enforced my long standing belief that the primary reason we don't live in a world rife with terrorism and crime is because terrorists and criminals are almost exclusively stupid. Even the ones doing "complex financial crimes" (as categorized by prosecuting attorneys) are typically dummies stealing social security numbers from the people at the nursing home they work at, or bilking medicaid "on behalf of" the people living at the nursing home they work at.
If more smart people become motivated to do crime, we are screwed. Not only with the trains, planes, and other targets be successfully destroyed, we wont even catch them.
I think that getting away with assassination doesn't just require smarts (and it requires plenty of that in our heavily surveilled world where there are cameras all over the place), it also requires a lot of coolness of nerve so that you don't make simple, stupid mistakes in the middle of the act, in the throes of overwhelming fear, adrenaline and other kinds of emotions. I think that there are very very few people in the world who not only have the smarts to get away with an assassination of a high-value target, but also have the sort of emotional coolness where they can actually apply their intelligence to the situation while they are doing it, instead of having 90% of their smarts wiped away in the moment by raw adrenaline while trying to pull off the act, and/or just stumbling into the sort of friction that always happens when trying to implement a plan in real life as opposed to in theory or daydreams ("no plan survives contact with the enemy"). Dostoevsky wrote a great description of how this works in Crime and Punishment.
It boggles the mind that Luigi didn't have a pre-arranged Airbnb in NJ he could have fled to, booked with a fake name, and holed up for a month or two, surviving exclusively off of DoorDash.
That would have done nothing for him. The key flaw in his plan was his inability to anonymously exit the heavily videotaped area that is Manhattan.
Eh, if he'd ditched the compromising stuff (like the gun) at some point he probably could have brazened it out.
Maybe at trial that helps you get to reasonable doubt, but given the video evidence there was no way he wasn't getting arrested and the case with just the video is strong enough to indict (indeed few are not). Its not a slam dunk case you would want to prosecute without the gun on his person, but you can still ethically put it on.
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Not sure how much that would have helped. Eventually, CCTV footage would either find him leaving Central Park and heading out of the city, in which case his choice of destination wouldn’t really matter—indeed, a psueodonymously-booked Airbnb would look extra sus. Or it wouldn’t, in which case he could go basically anywhere, even home, so long as he had a reasonable explanation for his absence. Maybe a weekend Airbnb booking would help establish an alibi, but then it’s better for it to be in his own name.
If I were him, I would have immediately destroyed the gun and tossed it into a large body of water—you could even do this while still in Central Park! I would also have brought a change of clothes and found a hiding spot in the park in which to lay low overnight, perhaps 24 hours or even longer, to throw off CCTV-based detection.
Uh, in Minecraft, of course.
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