From TPM Reader PB …
As someone who has worked in gun violence prevention for a long time, I was very much struck by how much Trump’s would-be assassin fit the school shooter profile — young, male, alienated and gun-obsessed — much more than any identifiable political or ideological profile.
I realize this won’t stop Republicans from claiming he was a crazed leftist on the basis of a $15 donation to a voter registration PAC, but outside the right-wing echo chamber, as Bill Clinton would say, “that dog won’t hunt.”
I have no idea why this guy decided to target Trump, and we likely never will get a clear motive. It certainly had something to do with the fact that he was swimming in the toxic stew of gun culture. Over the past twenty to thirty years, gun clubs have transformed from gathering places for hunting enthusiasts to hotbeds of white supremacist and anti-government sentiment and activity. They are also powerful forces at the state government level, serving as an often successful organizing force against gun reform laws.
While it seems counterintuitive, the shooter was far more right than left-aligned culturally and probably politically (I’ve seen quotes from high school classmates that suggest he was conservative in his political stances).
The gun safety advocate in me can’t help but point out that no one needs to own military-style assault weapons like the AR-15, and even a modest safe-storage law might have prevented this tragedy. These are precisely the kind of laws that gun clubs have organized their members to fight against.
Here in liberal Rhode Island, we finally got a safe-storage law passed this year and are still fighting for an assault weapon ban. Needless to say, passing these laws in Pennsylvania is a much heavier, if not impossible, lift. But beyond changing our laws, we need to take a serious look at the toxic culture that surrounds gun culture in the U.S. and the damage it is doing to the nation as a whole.
I’m not naive enough to think an assassination attempt will be enough to change the politics of gun control on the right. Still, we need a serious national conversation about guns and gun fetishism that goes beyond changing our laws.
