Of the many reactions to the recent attempt on Trump’s life at his rally in Butler, PA, surely the most misguided is the need on the part of investigators and the media to assign a motive to the would-be assassin, to discover what “ideology” might have driven him to fire upon the rally, nick Trump in the ear, kill an innocent bystander, and get himself promptly shot to death.
It’s no surprise that we tend to focus on personal identity when we seek explanations for the inexplicable. In the grip of outrage, we have a childlike wish for a story, for a neat linear narrative. It may serve our fleeting need to impose meaning where there is none, but in this case it can only aggrandize a life that was pitifully brief and, in the end, brutally small. Worse, it distracts us from what we might actually do to lessen the probability of such public tragedies in the future.
This 20 year old boy — for that he surely was— had no accomplices, and his short, commonplace past reveals no glaring red flags. It seems likely that, in the words of Gertrude Stein, there is no “there” there, and further inquiry into his motives and beliefs will be not only fruitless, but counterproductive.
Six decades ago, during my teen years, I lived in the same suburb as Thomas Matthew Crooks, just across McMurray Road from Bethel Park, PA, in the township of Upper St. Clair. I couldn’t suppress a rueful smile when, after the assassination attempt, a local official described Bethel Park as “middle class, maybe upper-middle class,” as that’s just what we thought we were — unremarkable, but well off, living the American dream before it was called that, and far too modest to say it even if it had been.
When I was 14, after much pleading, I was finally allowed by my parents, neither of whom had touched a gun in their lives, to buy a Co2-powered BB gun, which I promptly used to shoot a bird in our back yard and, stricken with remorse, never used again. Beyond that, guns are something I remember not at all from my childhood, but evidently things have radically changed since then in the south hills of Pittsburgh.
In a high school photo of Thomas Matthew Crooks that’s been reproduced by countless news outlets, I see a familiar face. A nerd like I was, skinny and small. Into chess and coding and, of course, video games. An aspiring engineer, quiet, intelligent, with few friends. In that shy, bespectacled face you can’t see a future assassin, but you certainly can see struggle and uncertainty.
None of this begins to excuse his murderous and suicidal acts of that Saturday afternoon. He’s less deserving of our empathy than of our scorn, and we’re repeating a now-habitual mistake by assigning him fame, that bleak social coin that outweighs all other measures and only invites more of the same derangements. We should forget the boy and look to what nurtured him — or didn’t.
He grew up in a family where guns were not only common, but abundant. His father reportedly owned more than a dozen firearms, freely accessible to his son, including the AR-15 used against Trump. Thomas Crooks reportedly tried and failed to join his high school’s rifle team, but practiced shooting at a local range, whose only requirement was that you show up. Practice for what, we might wonder now? To shoot deer? Thing is, you don’t shoot deer with an AR-15. You play at something far more grim.
AR-15s are a civilian version of a lightweight, portable killing machine created for the US military in the 1950s, and aggressively peddled by Colt to the masses starting in the ‘60s. We despise Purdue Pharma for precipitating the opioid epidemic, but somehow give a pass to the aggressive marketing of a military-style weapon decade after decade by gun manufacturers who have flooded our country with firearms, and the wholesale capitulation of federal and state lawmakers to those manufacturers’ commercial interests. Today there are almost 20 million AR-15s in civilian hands. And that’s obscene.
If we want a story to explain the recent events in Butler, that is the story to tell: of a boy growing up in a household — and a society — where guns have become so commonplace and uncontained that their use becomes second nature, no matter the passing impulse or perverted fantasy. That is the “motive” of Thomas Crooks that we need to identify and recognize for the societal rot that it is.