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I have a lot of thoughts about it. I'm just not sure how many of them I ought to memorialize in a blog post.
I think we can all agree -- I hope we can, at least -- that violence has no place in political discourse. I also think we can agree that Americans have a history of attempting to settle our differences, real or perceived, with firearms.
The shooter -- whose name I'm not going to mention, in keeping with recent trends -- appears to be a natural suspect in some respects but not in others. He was young -- just a couple of years out of high school -- and worked at an entry-level job in a nursing home. Former classmates said he was quiet and very smart; one said he'd been bullied in school every day. The gunman had donated to ActBlue, the Democratic donation machine, once in the past, but he registered as a Republican for this, his first presidential election. He used an AR-15 that apparently was owned by his father.
The victims include a volunteer firefighter who was shot while shielding his family from the gunfire. Two more people are in critical condition. All three were in the stands behind Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president and the assailant's apparent target. Trump suffered only a damaged earlobe.
There are lots of questions about how the shooter got to his vantage point without running afoul of the Secret Service, which had ten days' notice of the rally -- plenty of time, presumably, to scope out the venue for potential sniper nests.
And really, right now, that's pretty much everything we know. We don't know the shooter's motivation. We've heard from both Republicans and Democrats who want to make this a partisan thing. A Republican member of Congress has publicly blamed President Biden. Other Republicans want to make Democrats responsible because of their dislike of Trump. Democrats have speculated on whether this was a false flag operation to make Trump into a martyr. That spectators were also shot might discount that theory -- except that the pro-gun lobby hasn't shown much empathy for victims in previous mass shootings, preferring to accept them as collateral damage in their crusade to preserve their presumed Second Amendment right to shoot anyone they want to.
(See, that's the sort of opinion I probably shouldn't preserve in a blog post. I guess it's too late now, though.)
Anyway, armchair speculation is a fun parlor game until someone gets hurt -- and someone has. Let's ratchet back the rhetoric, let the professional investigators do their job, and get on with the election without further violence.
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These moments of targeted blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe out there, everybody.
2 comments:
Totally agree. I hate to give it any energy.
Pretty much how I feel, but Trump and his followers will capitalize on his attempted assassination. No matter what happens, it always has positive consequences for him.
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