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If this latest information is accurate, then (1) the guy was a nutjob (2) he was a Dem (3) contra other comments on here he wasn't motivated by right-wing anti-abortion sentiment (if he was going to knock off Democratic politicians, then they're mainly going to be pro-choice as well, so looks like once more correlation is not causation).
C’mon, “was a nutjob” is the free square in any impersonal murder outside of actual government assassination or gang violence (but I repeat myself). They’re always nutjobs! It’s in the job description! There’s nothing productive that can possibly come of random violence. In order for it to be productive, it needs to be highly regular and difficult to prevent, but random lone wolf killers are never regular and can’t convince people to change their actions outside of getting better security detail. And that’s assuming the killer even has a putative political agenda and isn’t just lashing out.
It’s what bugs me about every manifesto. People are fidgeting in their seats waiting for the PDF to drop, but I can tell you what’s behind door number one through infinity of this particular game show: nothing but lunacy. The only suspense is whether you’re going to get literal nonsense schizo ravings, a poorly-hacked-together litany of grievances against various parties who were all but assuredly NOT shot in the event, or personal impotence carefully disguised as a political theory with sweeping claims about Western Civilization. But that’s just picking favorite flavors when it’s already a given that the nut has cracked.
I believe this is near where you stand on the issue too, but trying to make sense of motives for random killers is like reading tea leaves from a cup of drip coffee. These people say things, but the sheer baffling idiocy of the crime makes it clear that whatever they say is absolute drivel and the real reason is that their brains are broken, they are not capable of making up sane lines of reasoning any longer, it’s just a matter of how much horsepower is left to pretty the diseased thoughts up. That’s why Ted Kaczynski has such staying power: his writing is so good and his rhetoric so strong that he can distract you from the obvious fact that his natural conclusion to the question of getting a controversial book published was to mail bombs. Insane, insane. My crank of a grandpa just self-published instead, and they’ve both had the same effect on actual mainline theory.
So yeah, the guy’s a nutjob, the next one will be too, and the one after that all the way down to the last man. It’s always been this way, but I guess there’s lurid pleasure in reading something really bent. And maybe it’ll wind up being suitably specious cannon fodder in this or that culture war, as a treat.
That's the problem at this particular moment; the latest nutjob is not just agreed to be a nutjob, he has to have a secret agenda which will demonstrate that he is One Of Them and that naturally it is Their Fault for encouraging such people with their inflammatory rhetoric. We got it with Sarah Palin and a target map, we got it with the Pulse nightclub shooter, we're getting it with every shooting since (of course that person was influenced by party A or party B to do this, there is a direct political line so we can make hay by blaming our political rivals!) That's why Walz was straight out of the gate with "this is a politically motivated assassination" instead of shutting up until there was more information, or just saying something about mentally ill individuals having access to guns.
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