Francis Wilkinson
We have entered the motive stage. What was the shooter thinking? Was he a radical driven by ideology? A mentally unhinged loner longing to impress a movie star? A disgruntled employee who just lost his job and wanted to shoot something? Why did a 20-year-old white man from Western Pennsylvania shoot Donald Trump Saturday night?
These questions are part of the ritual aftermath of a major public shooting. They are also completely irrelevant.
In a nation of 340 million people there are millions of Americans who fit virtually every one of the broad labels above. Millions of Americans are addled by political ideology. Millions hate their jobs or were fired by a boss whom they despise. Millions are loners struggling with emotions they can’t always control. Millions hate the current president or an ex-president.
There is only one thing that differentiates Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, the man the FBI says is responsible for the shooting, from millions of other Americans who didn’t try to kill an ex-president: He added a loaded gun to his problems and brought the whole mess to a violent climax. Crooks carried a semi-automatic rifle with him to a political event and used it for the purpose for which it was designed. He grazed Trump with a bullet fired at a distance of roughly 150 meters, and left one dead and two critically wounded.
We can be grateful that Crooks wasn’t a better shot, which appears to be the reason that Trump is alive. A better shooter might have done more than graze his principal target. But even Crooks could’ve improved his chances. He might have taken a tip from the U.S. Supreme Court and applied a bump stock to his firearm. The court’s conservatives are absolutely gung-ho for Americans like Crooks, regardless of their personal demons, to be well-armed in our midst. In June, the majority gave a thumbs-up to bump stocks when it ruled that the Trump administration erred in banning the devices after 2017’s bump-stock-enabled massacre in Las Vegas.
A bump stock is a device designed to turn a semi-automatic killing machine into a more efficient, and even more indiscriminate, automatic killing machine. The Las Vegas killer fired off an estimated 1,000 rounds into the crowd in a matter of minutes. He was farther from his targets than Crooks was from Trump, yet with a bump stock he managed to kill 58 and injure hundreds.
A bump stock, like an AR-15, has no other purpose than to help a shooter kill more people, more quickly. But for reasons that they can never quite articulate, this Supreme Court, along with the Republican Party, encourages Americans to buy and possess extraordinarily efficient mass killing machines, and then encourages them to make them more deadly still. As someone who has read many of the court’s opinions, and many statements from Republican politicians, I can report that the rationale does not involve well-regulated militias. But the reasons typically provided, about rights and safety, have been repeatedly exposed as nonsense. Enabling murder does not preserve rights. Endangering the public does not enhance safety.
With a bump stock attached to his semi-automatic rifle, Crooks could’ve sprayed the stage around Trump. His lack of skill likely wouldn’t have mattered. And our politics, sick as they are, would likely have been rendered instantly sicker. There are a lot of unbalanced people in America. Why so many politicians and judges want them to keep killing us is the only question of motive that matters.
(Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy.)
