The Most Frightening Shooters Are the Smart Ones
A manifesto-like email allegedly sent by the dinner shooter suggests a murderous obsession with Trump’s politics.
The line “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done” could probably have been written in an email to friends by any number of the attendees at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But the line was apparently written by a man who showed up with a shotgun and pistol and was ready to kill “most everyone” there to get to Donald Trump and assassinate him and his Cabinet. In a manifesto-like email that he reportedly sent to family minutes before allegedly shooting, Cole Tomas Allen wrote that the assembled journalists and machers “chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit.” Allen never came near the president or the gala floor. A Secret Service agent was shot in the vest before Allen was tackled and arrested.
Random acts of violence by unstable individuals are unfortunately a feature of modern life. The most frightening shooters are not these yahoos, but the smart ones—those who carefully plan, train, and choose their settings to inflict maximum damage. Think of Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 69 youngsters at a left-wing summer camp in Norway, or the Islamic State commandos who killed 90 music fans at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. The email attributed to Allen as well as the scant biographical details known about him suggest that he had the capacity to do much more harm than he did. But something proved defective in his plan or mind, and as a result, no one was killed.
