Days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, a motive for the shooting remains elusive.
The FBI is still scouring for information about the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, whose political views were initially unclear, although it was later revealed that he was a registered Republican in Pennsylvania who also previously made a $15 campaign donation to a Democrat-aligned group.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Deitz, who has studied mass shooters for decades, told KNX News there are a lot of common denominators for would-be assassins.
“There are two primary movers for American assassins. One is to expel a grievance, and that's a pretty broad statement because everybody's got a grievance one way or another,” Deitz said. “But there are people who specialize in developing and nurturing long-standing grievances. This was not a common phenomenon before the dawn of the internet, but has become very common today.”
Then there are instances of assassins who have no real political motivation – it's just about becoming infamous.
“The other possibility – and these are not mutually exclusive – is that primarily this is a performance crime designed to show others what he's capable of, and designed to give himself a place in history as an infamous criminal,” Deitz said.
Deitz says the fact that Crooks doesn't appear to be affiliated with any extremist groups doesn't mean he didn't develop extreme views on his own. In fact, he said that loners often develop unreasonable beliefs because “that set of beliefs isn't corrected by the reasonable people around them.”
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It should be noted that Deitz never examined Crooks. He acknowledged that profiling mass shooters can be tricky and imprecise, but said that so far, Crooks’ profile matches up with several former school shooter suspects.
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