In the months after an isolated, deeply troubled 20-year-old took his mother’s AR-style rifle and opened fire inside Connecticut's Sandy Hook elementary school, gun sales exploded, partly fueled by the threat of a fresh ban on the assault weapons that would become the firearm of choice for some of the most infamous killers.
Among 2013’s gun buyers, investigators would later learn, was a man in western Pennsylvania whose son attended elementary school. He purchased an AR-style rifle that fired 5.56mm rounds.
A decade later, his son — also isolated, troubled and 20 years old — shouldered that same rifle atop a sloped roof in Butler, Pa., and fired it eight times in an apparent attempt to assassinate former president Trump, reports the Washington Post.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot and killed seconds later, remains enigmatic. A registered Republican who’d given a $15 donation to a progressive group, he was not overtly political or ideological. He did well in school, drew little attention in his middle-class neighborhood.
He didn’t leave behind a significant online presence or manifesto spelling out his motivation.
Where he fits into the catalogue of notorious gunmen could take years to understand. He’s hard to categorize, in part because his portrait evokes the profile of a mass shooter, at least one of whom he researched.
Crooks wasn’t a mass shooter, instead becoming what some historians believe to be the youngest person to make an attempt on the life of a current or past president.
Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said, “If this is an individual who was like a school shooter, disturbed and angry, and found this as a way to lash out, that’s a terrible, terrible social problem we need to deal with, but it’s not a question of our democracy,. It’s important that we know whether or not we need to worry about political violence, more than any other violence.”
Three decades ago, the U.S. Secret Service set out to analyze 83 actual or would-be assassins who had acted between 1949 and 1996.
Researchers came to a stark conclusion: “There are no accurate — or useful — descriptive, demographic, or psychological ‘profiles’ of American assassins, attackers, and near-lethal approachers.”
Crooks conforms with the report’s broader trends: 86 percent were men, 77 percent White; more than half were single, and three in five had no children; most attempts were on presidents, members of Congress or other public figures being protected by the Secret Service.
In some ways, Crooks was anomalous. He was younger than the vast majority, few of whom were students. Just 30 percent used rifles or shotguns. There’s little evidence, so far, that Crooks had a “history of resentments or grievances against others,” as 97 percent of those studied did.
Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of “Warning Signs: Identifying School Shooters Before They Strike," noted that Connecticut school shooter Adam Lanza had failed in key "life domains," but Crooks appeared to have been succeeding in several of those domains.
“This is not a case of someone who’s failed in everything and feels like he’s a loser, a nobody, and the only thing he can do with his life is go out in a blaze of glory,” Langman said.
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