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That wasn’t an example of ideologically-motivated violence, so far as we can tell. The attempted killer was a former professional associate of the victims who seems to have gone nuts.
People who decide to try and shoot a politician tend to be fucking weird. Zangara and Oswald, for example, were bonkers, but they were pretty clearly also politically motivated.
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I'm not sure there's a principled way to distinguish between "ideologically motivated" and "seems to have gone nuts." For obvious reasons we tend not to have long case histories of assassins post-act, but I kinda doubt most of them were level headed and doing well.
When we had actual large-scale political violence, like the troubles in Northern Ireland, or medium-scale political violence like the Days of Rage in the US, the people committing the violence looked very different to this lot - not least because they formed part of organised groups with standards. The Black Panthers or the IRA would have kicked out Thomas Crooks or Ryan Routh for being a liability.
I still thinks this looks more like "something memetic is making all the school shooters shoot politicians instead of schools"
Prediction: the man who shot Kirk has no history of political activism as part of the Democratic Party or any organised centre or far-left group.
I don't know enough about either the IRA or those particular men to really argue that intelligently, but the Black Panthers leadership was so drug addled, horny, dysfunctional, and idiotic that I'm not very confident they would have kicked guys out for being weird.
My view of things is more that a young man possessed of the kind of death drive that leads to a school shooting can easily be diverted by socially offered outlets for that death drive, like terrorism or gang violence or tribal warfare. This is why we don't really see school shootings in demographics with significant gang problems, or in countries with terrorism problems.
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To loosely spitball an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while: maybe (some of) what we see as "partisan fraying" is actually happening mostly in cyberspace (it's an old word, but I think it applies here), where it's easy to un-person someone on the other side: "oh, that a troll/bot/foreign psyop, ban them." (see "words are violence") The virtual version (aspect?) of our culture really is fraying at the seams because there never was a notion of "national unity" in the borderless cyberspace. This bleeds over into meatspace mostly from people who can't see the difference: I think you have to be terminally online to accept "X is genocide" to logically precede "so we should kill X supporters" as reality. And political activism still has a huge meatspace component: you go to conventions, protests, volunteer to phone bank or go door-to-door that filters out someone radically, terminally online enough to actually choose violence.
But I could be very wrong.
ETA: Surely there are some limits on legitimate political organizations accepting purely-online contributions. Otherwise it seems a matter of time until "your so-called phone-bank volunteers that you never vetted in-person were actually call center workers in [foreign nation A] getting paid by [foreign nation B]". The JIDF et al already get looked at pretty askance.
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