The New Yorker:

When an act of violence doesn’t lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it.

By Jay Caspian Kang

Less than a week after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, on July 13th, in Butler, Pennsylvania, it appears that most of the public and much of the media have already started to move on. This should not be surprising, given all that we hear these days about our short attention spans and the speed of history. But I admit that I have found it somewhat disturbing—not because I believe a great national trauma has taken place and that the country has decided to bury it deep under the ground, but because this swift diminishment of interest seems to reflect the manner in which we prioritize and value different types of violence. When I began writing this column, this past Tuesday, around 5:30 p.m. on the West Coast, there were no stories about the shooting in the top slots on the Web sites of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal, all of which were focussed, appropriately, on the Republican National Convention. Evidently, the gunman, a twenty-year-old from suburban Pittsburgh named Thomas Matthew Crooks, did not leave behind a manifesto or some lengthy and lurid trail of online crumbs, and so, it seemed, there was no real story to tell. We still know little about him, save for a few details that already feel rote: he was a registered Republican who had donated to a liberal voter-turnout group; he worked in a nursing home; he showed passing interest in both computers and guns; and the few people who crossed his path never saw anything like this coming. On Wednesday, the F.B.I. reported that its agents had conducted numerous interviews, looked through documents, and could find no motive. Rather than regard the assassination attempt as an incident of political violence, many have begun placing it within a more common, even sadly pedestrian classification: the random shooter. A loner with an AR-15 commits an act of violence, and we typically have nothing to say except that this seems to happen all the time in America.

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