Editorial: Another shooting

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was not a conspiracy. It was the action of a lone, 20-year-old man armed with an assault rifle who somehow climbed onto a building just 175 yards away and started shooting. Something grazed Trump. One man in the crowd died trying to cover his family from gunshots. Two others were seriously injured. The gunman was shot on the roof by security personnel.

He was a math and science nerd, slight and bespectacled, who worked at a nursing home nearby. He was a registered Republican who once gave $15 to a Democratic voter turnout campaign. Acquaintances said he was bullied constantly growing up. His father bought the gun that was used. Explosive devices were found in his vehicle and at his home. He was deranged. He wanted to make a big bang. It probably had very little to do with politics.

How he was allowed to climb atop that building is bewildering. Local and federal authorities sort of blamed each other in the wake of the shooting. But there he was, armed with a weapon designed for military combat.

It was almost an identical scenario with the young man who shot up the school in Perry: bullied, nothing to live for, steeped in gun culture and violence, weapons at hand.

Within minutes of shots fired, politicians blamed mainstream media for creating the shooter, and President Biden for stoking the animus against former President Trump. Rally goers flipped the bird into the CNN cameras in the aftermath.

Still, the fact remains that a solo actor with delusional thinking and a gun did this. Just like the ones who shot Rep. Gabby Giffords, a Democrat, or Rep. Steve Scalise, a Republican.

Our politics are bad, no doubt. Donald Trump has done as much as anyone to undermine our democracy and our trust in each other. President Biden in a primetime Sunday evening TV address urged Americans to unite and tone down their rhetoric. We shame ourselves when we demonize people who are misled by nonstop propaganda. We should be mindful of our talk, of course. But …

Rhetoric did not pull the trigger.

It’s too easy to get a gun. You should not have to arm up for a political rally. We are so steeped in the gun culture that loading up and firing seems the obvious answer for the desperately insane.

This young man’s acquaintances said he was bullied growing up and kept to himself. They did not describe attempts to reach out to him. Nobody did. But he could get a gun easily enough. These events are planned to bring attention onto people who have been shunned their whole lives. Some plan a suicide by cop.

It probably doesn’t have that much to do with our politics, which have always been vile and violent. Recall the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, two of the Founders, which left Hamilton dead. Crazy people like John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley have always been out there with guns aiming at public figures so they can live in infamy. The common problem is guns, not speech, usually involving a single white male with a long history of psychological trauma left untended.

It would be nice if we could unite. Nearly every American already rejects political violence, but they define it differently. A significant number believe that the Jan. 6 insurrection that also left people dead was a patriotic protest. Then-President Trump incited the insurrection. You cannot strike that from history or the current campaign debate in search of a more civil discourse. A cracker congressman from Georgia said President Biden should answer for the assassination attempt. Nuts on the left suggested that Trump staged the shooting. It’s crazy talk. We have been avoiding facts for some time and enough among us create false realities — that guns are not the problem, that speech is, or the media are the problem, or that certain books are the source of the fever. Social media amplifies the neurosis.

The core problem is guns in the hands of crazy people whose ideations are echoed in the unregulated realms of social media platforms. Nothing is done about that. It is difficult for a grounded reality to compete against the gun lobby and the giant social media portals driving the insanity.