A shooting happens. Cue the circus. Cable anchors put on their solemn faces, politicians squeeze out their pre-written lines, and Twitter fills with keyboard prophets reading entrails like Roman augurs.
“Look! He liked Trump memes — clearly a right-wing terrorist!”
“No, he followed gender activists on TikTok — clearly a leftist lunatic!”
Both sides pound the table, as if the meaning of the carnage can be divined like tea leaves. By day three, the only thing anyone agrees on is that America is being torn apart by political enemies in their midst.
It’s all theater. A blood-soaked ritual in which every tragedy must prove that the other tribe is to blame. Meanwhile, the actual shooters — and the people they kill — get lost in the noise.
Not all shootings are the same. In fact, there are two broad types — and confusing them is like confusing a hurricane with an earthquake. Both kill, but they come from very different places.
Think of Dylann Roof, who walked into a Charleston church in 2015 and murdered nine people because they were black and Christian. Or Patrick Crusius, who drove to El Paso in 2019 and opened fire in a Walmart because Hispanics were shopping there. Or Audrey Hale, who stormed the Covenant School in Nashville in 2023 with a grudge against Christians. Or Robin Westman, who attacked a Catholic school in Minneapolis just last week.
The pattern is clear: the targets are interchangeable representatives of a hated group. Any black church, any Christian school, any grocery store with a large Hispanic customer base. Often, there’s a personal tie — Hale once attended Covenant, Westman had ties to the Annunciation school — but the individuals themselves don’t matter.
And nearly every time, the shooter leaves behind a manifesto. Roof scrawled racist screeds, Crusius left a long rant about immigration, Hale filled journals, Westman scribbled anti-Christian bile and even wrote “Kill Trump” on his ammunition. The writing is the point. It gives their rage a costume and a stage. Psychologically, these shooters are like men standing on the beach, staring at a tsunami, scribbling their last words in the sand before the wave crashes.
Now compare that to the Alexandria baseball practice in 2017, when James Hodgkinson deliberately targeted Republican congressmen. Or the Butler, Pa., rally in 2024, where Thomas Crooks took aim at Donald Trump, grazing the candidate’s ear and murdering an innocent attendee behind him. Or the Minnesota attack in 2025, where a gunman ambushed state leaders Melissa Hortman and Erin Murphy, killing Hortman and her husband.
These shooters didn’t choose interchangeable targets. They tracked and hunted specific political figures because of their office or political aspirations. Hodgkinson wasn’t out to kill any random conservative neighbor; he wanted sitting lawmakers. Crooks didn’t just hate Republicans; he fired at Trump himself. The Minnesota shooter wasn’t lashing out at “Democrats in general” — he tracked down Hortman and Murphy.
And unlike the hate-driven killers, these shooters often don’t bother with manifestos. The act itself is the manifesto. Shooting Scalise or Trump or Hortman says everything they want said. Their psychology is the opposite of the tsunami sufferer. They aren’t drowning. They imagine themselves on a mountain peak, striking at the heart of history.
This distinction is not academic. Hate-driven shootings are the rotten fruit of alienation and untreated mental illness, wrapped in borrowed stories of grievance. Political shootings are assassination attempts — direct assaults on democracy itself. Both are deadly, but they demand different responses. Lumping them together into the partisan blame machine hides the truth and ensures we’ll keep failing to stop them.
If we’re serious about stopping these attacks, we have to stop pretending they’re all the same. Hate-driven shootings and political shootings are two different beasts. Treat them the same, and we fail twice.
The same gun can be fired in Charleston or El Paso, in Butler or Minneapolis, but the motives are not the same. One is the cry of the drowning, the other the delusion of the king on the mountain. Both kill. Both must be stopped. But if we want real solutions, we have to treat them as what they are — different beasts, demanding different cures.
The solutions benefit both sides. There is no reason Republicans and Democrats alike should not support them. The problems are real for everyone, and the cures would make the country safer for all. Yet agreement never comes. Could it be that, for some, it is more politically useful to leave the problem unsolved — to keep the blood flowing so it can be used to justify a cause? I hope not. But if that is the case, it would be nothing short of monstrous.
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