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I don't know, whether or not it's a rarity, I think the reason this is getting this much attention is because it's on video. The same with the subway stabbing that this subsumed or even George Floyd. If there was public video of those school shootings I think there'd be a major national conversation about them. Seeing someone die evokes much more of a reaction than seeing a dead person, and even less than reading about a dead person. Politicians obviously want to protect themselves but most people don't really care about politicians, or political people, not in the way that this would be an important event to them. But this guy died and they saw it happen. It imparts a connection without any other knowledge of him. I suppose it's why martyrdom can be so captivating.
I also think this is why it seems so much worse that the ghouls are dancing on a grave. The video removes the steps of abstraction that should make it easy to treat a political enemy as someone who should die because they're bad. You could believe that the violence and death was abstract enough that they didn't really mean it. It becomes harder to rationalize the ghoulishness when you and the person you're arguing with just watched a man die. I think when /pol/ comes to you instead of you having to go to it that will definitely shock and stir a lot of people into continued interest.
I don't think that hurts, but I think the main reason is that Kirk was a prominent right-wing figure and you already had a lot of people champing at the bit for an excuse to crack some heads. Similarly, Floyd's murder tapped into a pre-existing resentment of police brutality that we'd seen flare up in, e.g. Ferguson and NYC (and also you had hundreds of millions of people with cabin fever).
By contrast, there's no political factions around school shootings. There's no opposition to mobilize against, and to the extent that there's a national conversation to be had, we've already had it.
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