Information is of course still coming out, but based on
this CNN profile of the shooter, I wouldn't be surprised if the shooter was entirely apolitical, and just wanted to assassinate Trump as a way to make his mark on the world, and let everyone know he existed.
It wouldn't be completely unheard of. Arguably most assassinations in the U.S. are of this variety. (Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinkley Jr., Mark David Chapman--You'd have to go pretty far back in U.S. history to find an assassination that was actually political).
This is also the motivation of many school shooters. And as has been pointed out by others, this young man was in the same age range as the typical school shooter.
I've been seeing a lot of talk on social media about how this is a sign that political polarization is out of control, but I'm tempted to see this incident not as an example of political extremism, but just another example of the problem of gun violence in the United States--a lot of available guns, and a lot of disturbed young men do not make a good combination.
But of course the Right is going to make this into a huge martyr story. I mean, of course they will. To be perfectly honest, I think that if the positions had been reversed, and a prominent Democratic politician had been shot at, I would probably have a hard time not seeing it as a political attack. That's just the way we humans think. We can't imagine that this was just a random example of gun violence, so we have to see it as a political conspiracy.
(Someone, I forget who at the moment, used this tendency to explain all the elaborate conspiracy theories behind JFK's assassination. We humans can't fathom that a President could just be killed by some random nobody, so we have to make an elaborate conspiracy theory about it.)
So... be prepared for the Right to be talking about this event in political terms for some time to come.
Addendum: This Tweet popped up in my Twitter feed.
