Let me state at the outset that I have absolutely no qualifications as a psychologist. I took one freshman level class — that’s it. However, I’m a parent, and raised two children through their fragile, tumultuous teenage years, including one not-too-serious suicide attempt and another brief attempt at running away. (The kiddos are now grown and doing reasonably well.)
Like the rest of you, I’ve been following developments in the attempted Trump assassination last weekend, including a fine piece this morning by contributor Charles Jay, who theorized that the shooting was really a suicide-by-cop. Later in the day, something clicked into place for me.
It wasn’t about politics. Or Trump. Not really.
It was about the shooter’s Dad.
We initially learned that the shooter was a registered Republican, who expressed conservative views at school. A while ago he made a small contribution to a “progressive organization” for a voter registration effort, though this may have been someone with the same name. It could also be that he didn’t recognize that the organization was on the “other side”, and hadn’t yet absorbed the Trump-era Republican ethos that registering voters is bad. And we can’t dismiss the possibility that he was solicited for a donation by a pretty girl who smiled at him. (Teenage boys are fairly pliable that way.) So unless we learn more in this vein, I don’t think it’s significant.
More recently, we learned that the family had posted a lot of Trump signs, and the murder weapon was his father’s AR-15. So the kid’s politics appear to have been inherited from his gun-owning parents, who identified with the MAGA movement, and were presumably admirers of Donald Trump.
Now, suppose you really, really, really hated your father. What is the most horrible thing you could do to him? You could (a) assassinate his political idol, (b) with his own firearm, and (c) die in the effort.
Maybe we’ll learn more. Maybe the kid did leave a suicide note somewhere, and maybe we’ll find out that some of the early reporting was flat-out wrong. But with what we know so far, I think this fits.
If you’re into the Thoughts & Prayers (TM) business, let’s remember first the dead, retired fire chief who was just in the wrong place. Attending a MAGA rally shows poor taste, but it shouldn’t be a capital offense. Then spare some sympathy for the two people who were injured but survived. Those high-velocity rounds leave horrible wounds, and they may never fully recover from their injuries.
But spare a little pity for the shooter’s parents, who will spend the rest of their lives asking themselves what they should have done differently, and never finding an answer.