After a shooting happens, there’s usually a frantic effort to dig through social media to find information about the shooter. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there’s an easy motive within view or a manifesto (even if the authorities cover it up as in Nashville) left behind. Sometimes not.

Whatever information about the motive of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the attempted Trump assassin, remains may be in his phone which the authorities supposedly have trouble getting into. Some people have noticed that he doesn’t have much social media, but that’s not too surprising for his age group. Crooks wasn’t an aspiring rapper or a teenage girl showing off so he wouldn’t necessarily have TikTok or Instagram. And since he’s under 50, he wouldn’t have a Facebook account. Twitter is not that common outside people with specialized interests like politics. As I predicted, he did have a Discord, but the company is claiming that he didn’t use it for politics. That’s not too strange since Discord also serves as a platform for all sorts of programs including gaming and AI. And at his age, it’s what he probably used it for.

Initially, it was claimed that he was a registered Republican and that he had donated through ActBlue to a leftist turnout campaign. Both of those claims have been challenged. And it’s not clear where the truth lies. A fellow student described him as ‘conservative’ but non-conservatives tend to be the worst readers of that. And at his age, politics can change radically not only year to year, but month to month. There are teens and twenty-somethings who go from alt-right to Antifa over the course of a couple of months.

Then there’s the usual school shooter stuff. He dressed in camo, was bullied and no one liked him.

Does any of this stuff matter? Arguably not.

Look, the average mass shooter is a loser. They’re most often alienated teens and twenty-somethings diagnosed as mentally unstable who are looking to forcibly make an impact. I’ve read more manifestos than I count and none of them are interesting. No one takes them seriously, no one has suffered like them, girls don’t like them, but when they shoot up a place they will experience an incredible sense of fulfillment and no one will forget them. It’s Columbine culture, it’s evil and it’s also boring.

Mass shooters carry out shootings because what they do is more interesting than who they are.

I expect that Thomas Matthew Crooks will fall into that category. He may have changed the course of an election and a country. And that is what your average loser with a gun wants to do. (Even if it didn’t happen the way he had planned it.) He also took the life of a husband and a father, and wounded two others.

Columbine culture is all about losers inflicting as much damage and making everyone pay attention to them. The best revenge is to forget them.