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If Freddie is right, then successfully eliminating every trace of the shooter’s supposed ideology would be a temporary fix at best. The problem is that there is a force (his “strange attractor”) unmooring young men and making them more prone to violence, and that absent one ideology they will find another.
This is a fairly concrete objection to focusing on political rhetoric in favor of understanding the cycle of chaos that he posits as the real driving force here.
Murder rate in the US has been holding fairly steady at 6±2 homicides per 100,000 residents per year since the mid 90s. Any hypothesized "strange attractor" for making young men more prone to violence would have to take into account that young men don't seem to be becoming much more prone to violence over time, especially when controlling for demographics.
I can kinda see the argument for "some extremely small subset of young men are going to violently snap and do whatever their cultural script says that violent young men who snap should do, and that script is flipping from "shoot up a school" to "kill someone important in a flashy way", but that's more of a statement about the script than about the young men.
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This seems like trying to determine if that poor Ukrainian woman's murder was caused by a deranged psycho or by a system that allowed a deranged psycho to go in and out of the system over a dozen times without deciding to lock him up long-term. It's clearly both. Deranged psychos will always exist, no matter how hard we try to prevent them from existing, and so it's incumbent on us in the rest of society to keep us protected from deranged psychos.
Unmoored young men will always exist, and they will always turn to violence. Yes, we can work on the root causes that are making men more unmoored (well, theoretically we can - empirically, perhaps we can't), but also, we must operate under the reality that there will always be unmoored men who will turn to violence, and that how much they turn to violence and what forms of violence they turn to are not immutable facts of nature but rather modulated by their culture. Thus those among us who believe that a lack of political violence is preferable have a responsibility to call out ideologies that are more encouraging of channeling that penchant for violence towards bad, unproductive forms of violence like political assassinations.
I suggest reworking your parallel here - in the first case, an active external system should have locked the guy away. In the second, a set of ideas should have inspired a lost young man differently. Why should we have not locked him up instead? Or relied on friendly pluralism to convince a madman to not stab a stranger? It’s hard to reconcile the analogy.
What's hard to reconcile about this analogy? The difference between an active system and a set of ideas aren't material for the analogy to work. In either case, we have the individual himself who is fully responsible for the actions he took and also the systems around him that encouraged and/or enabled him to take such actions. If the system had been set up differently, even someone exactly as deranged or as unmoored as these young men wouldn't, on the margin, have enacted the violence they had; by being in prison or by just deciding that having bad opinions doesn't deserve a death sentence. When we set up a system to protect innocent bystanders from deranged lunatics since deranged lunatics will always exist, we should probably lock them up long-term after they've indicated a penchant for ignoring the law. When we set up a system to reduce political violence (a good that goes beyond merely just reducing violence, due to how it enables poltical engagement by people who don't need to fear violence against them), we should probably discourage memes and ideologies that glorify assassins or assassinations or dehumanize people based on their political beliefs, since unmoored young men have a penchant for picking up these ideas and acting on them.
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