The FBI has revealed to lawmakers that the gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump and fatally shot an attendee at a Pennsylvania rally last weekend had also looked up information and schedules for President Biden, cabinet officials and the Democratic National Convention. Trump apparently just happened to be nearby.
Plenty of additional information is likely to keep trickling out over the coming days and weeks, but the more we learn about the assassin, the more we get a picture of an angry young man who seemed keen on targeting a high profile individual, without much care for who. We’re always geared to looking for motive, and especially when it comes to the targeting of the figurehead of a political movement, we expect to see a political motive.
The uncomfortable truth is that sometimes this motive is simply wanting to sow chaos, to kill and be known forevermore as someone who did a terrible thing. And we have made it so incredibly easy, with a country awash in tools designed exclusively and to kill with ease and efficiency.
There were many security lapses around the Trump rally, and it’s shocking that the gunman was able to get into a position with a clear shot of the former president while surrounded by a small army of police and Secret Service whose entire purpose it is to prevent just this sort of thing. These lapses will be parsed exhaustively by investigators and members of Congress.
But one undeniable fact is that none of this would have been possible without the weapon in the shooter’s hands, a variant of the AR-pattern system that unscrupulous gun sellers have turned into the nation’s most popular firearm.
A rugged semi-automatic rifle that fires potent 5.56mm rounds with great accuracy over long distances, it’s a style designed decades ago for military use before making the leap to a civilian version. It’s not a very good gun for hunting — it would blow the prey to bits — or home defense in close quarters. If anything, its most lasting legacy will be as the weapon of choice for mass shooters, who value the fact that the gun can kill many people quickly without the need for much training.
The Trump shooter was a 20-year-old with no known formal training, considered such a bad shot that he was turned away from his school’s rifle team, which made his accuracy — less than an inch away from ending Trump’s life — surprising. As a former Defense Intelligence Agency operator wrote recently in Slate, this was as much a factor of the characteristics of the rifle itself as it was a reflection of the shooter’s skill. Put another way, with a different weapon in hand, the odds are good he would have missed entirely.
In his speech at the RNC last week, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance boasted about finding 19 loaded handguns in his grandmother’s house after her passing, once again equating guns to freedom while sitting feet from his nearly-killed running mate. We don’t have to live like this. Regardless of what the NRA and its litany of sympathetic politicians contend, it is not a God-given right to nor a clear constitutional aim to permit random citizens to purchase military-grade weapons as seamlessly as if they were buying a television or a chair. Enough.