And Tenacious D have now cancelled their tour due to Pete Gas's joke.
Essentially Jack Black was giving him a birthday cake and asked him to make a wish, Gas replied something along the lines of 'next time, don't miss trump'. This was during a concert, hours after the shooting.
Could be a while till we see them tour or crop up again.
Brave statement with all the MAGA packing nutbars out there. I wouldn't crack jokes like that myself to be honest, not worth dying for. Silly thing to do. It is not like Gas has a secret service detail 24/7.
The thing about the shooting that struck me is how the narrative around the use of fear shifted in a quantum leap.
Up until the shooting, MAGA have been the all powerful purveyor's of fear and intimidation. Their leader was the one who told the proud boys to stand back and stand by. MAGA killed the Capital police man erected a gallows, took cable ties into the parliament to abduct any politician they could find not on their side.
It is MAGA who have men with AR15's outside polling booths in America. Donald Trump wields them like a weapon, ala the Larry David Skit in a MAGA hat where the Biker sees his his colours and dials back his road rage to politely ask he be more careful.
All the while the Dem populace have been cowering and whining about being intimidated and threatened.
Skip forward to today, a registered Republican kid almost kills their leader live on television, we are told he made a donation to the a Democratic wing also (I want that verified since other reports say that is a confusion with someone else with the same name).
None of that really matters. When someone goes on a suicide mission to kill the hardest target in the world, it does not matter what their politics are, they in of themselves are the problem. People are speculating wildly and making up conspiracy theories like it matters which political party the shooter voted for, or donated money too.
Hello? we are talking about someone prepared to take a round to the head to kill someone else in a non active war scenario. That is the definition of either a professional assassin (which clearly a twenty year old is not) or as the Authorities have likely correctly noted a domestic terrorist, which in America often means a white person with a gun who likes to make bombs and is not representative of whatever political leanings they have.
The third option is mental illness. A complicated sphere which is problematic in this case for two main reasons. One the kid was organized, so he was far from being a floridly psychotic off the wall crazy.
And thus far his peer group have not identified mental health as a factor. The Shooters father rang the cops and said he is worried about his son who is not home, and an AR15 is missing, he did not mention to dispatch that his son is having a 'break down'or has an illness. Kids who say they knew him say he was bullied, but otherwise normal.
Mental health is my field of expertise. Specifically forensic mental health (Forensics are not just about dna, the other branch means relating to the criminal courts of law - the criminally insane were my bricks and mortar, my day to day customer for nearly thirty years).
People in Maxi that did some national news event horrors were the guys I lived most of my life around). Organisation and planning are diagnostic in the weighting of whether an act is driven by psychosis, planning is also an important part in that calculus, people who plan well and are highly organized are not having a full blown psychotic break from reality.
Evidence of planning in this case are ample.
The kid used a ladder to get onto the roof. Now online chat sites are going nuts about how he could have gotten away with carrying a ladder their in front of the security apparatus and predictably they leap to conspiracy theories about how it shows a set up.
Simple answer is he planned it, left the Ladder lying on the ground against the wall of the building before the Rally, (he might have even left it there days before hand). So that speaks to organization and planning. In an industrial collection of sheds, no one notices a ladder lying in the grass against a shed.
People seem to think he was able to walk in (perhaps from his car, perhaps not) with an AR15 and not get noticed. Again, as with the ladder trick, I would be critically examining whether the weapon was already there either in the grass....or on the roof top with a same coloured section of roofing material over the top of it disguising it from roof scans. I am sure the FBI would be drawing the same conclusions or at least putting them in the mix, if someone like me trained to think like that then they as the behavioral science experts of the world surely are using the same analysis I was trained in.
I digress, but I am just making the point this is someone who has been very clever relative to someone who is completely nuts. He was not crazy. He even had a distance finder on him which was picked up on, and he was noted to be strange and acting odd, however not enough to be flagged outright. And he was smart enough to wander away from the attention he was drawing.
His lack of a social media profile is being called abnormal, how bizarre our world has become when media who are social media whores are labeling someone as young as twenty as strange for not following the cult of social media.
We are told he was bullied, perhaps the media should start there in their machinations about why a young person who was bullied avoided all forms of social media?
So what do we know as potential fact so far:
A registered Republican, barely past his teens, from a strongly republican family, in a Republican strong hold tried to kill the Republican candidate in the presidential race.
The kid shooter was ethnically white, which is interesting in as much that all shooters are white males in these political assassinations and attempts. Plenty of ethnic radicals could claim reasons to shoot a president, but only White males go there.
Which is why we have a Behavioral science unit at the FBI, because there are patterns and predictable groupings of all these factors in such cases no matter what the politics of any given assassin is, the reasons are in the psychology, not the politics or the psychiatry.
Put simply guys like this are born with a pattern of thinking which places them at risk. If they get persecuted in their upbringing then those patterns of thought place them at risk of violence. Politics is merely an excuse for exercising their proclivities. A simple chance random variable could see the exact same FBI profile of a kid like this fire a bullet at Biden.
It is not about politics, it is about Forensics.
