A Worthless Search for Trump Shooter’s Motive

It seems every news report we have received in the last few days has referenced the search for the unknown “motive(s)” for Thomas Crooks’ trying to assassinate former President Donald Trump, an effort which injured the former president and also killed and injured innocent bystanders.

When it comes to explaining upsetting events, people abhor a vacuum.

Why do people want to know so desperately why something like this happened?  Because they think that the more accurately they can explain why something happened, the more accurately they can predict when and why it might happen again and ultimately control and prevent its reoccurrence. (READ MORE from Schaler and Vatz: Don’t Blame ‘Mental Illness’ for Mass Murder and Political Missteps)

We have been writing on the fruitless search for “motives” of miscreants for decades, and here is what we have found:

1. Specific motives are more often than not simply unknowable. Moreover, it doesn’t matter, in this case, whether Crooks was left-wing or right wing (evidence exists that he was conflicted), and when they are ascertainable, so what? John Hinckley is believed to have tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, a person who never knew him, and given her sexual orientation would not have been interested in him regardless. Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, said he did so due to an alleged personal resentment against Mr. Lennon and a desire to emulate Holden Caulfied of the novel The Catcher in the Rye.

They were just two insignificant people until they tried (or succeeded) to kill   important people.

2. Knowing a motive doesn’t matter because motives do not tell you who is going to try and kill someone. Everyone can be seen to have a motive to kill.  Moreover, we cannot deprive a person of liberty or responsibility simply because we believe they are going to commit a crime. We have in our admittedly lengthy professional lives known many bizarre people, some of whom seemed capable of violence, but there is no way to predict who will be violent except by previous or ongoing behavior. Shall we start putting loners and “weird” people in protective custody for their own good and public safety?
3. People who murder famous people are usually utterly uninteresting people, “nobodies,” who gain salience with society-at-large only one way: taking the life of an important person that makes them famous. And unfortunately, thanks to media sensationalism, they are right.  We label murderers like Crooks as having an “existential” motive.  Killing another gives the murderer a sense of meaning in his or her otherwise empty life.

Probable Motive

That is the likely motive in this case.  Thomas Matthew Crooks, often now identified by his full name like Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and others, bespeaking their new-found assigned significance, was a miserable self-obsessed loner who had some history of supporting Republicans and progressives.

Was he an ideologue?   There is no evidence of it.  He was friendless and bullied, but millions of people in this country are friendless and bullied … very few kill people and try to kill famous people.

Did he expect to live?  No way of knowing, but by killing former President Trump he would likely have the existential significance of being known well and reviled by people who otherwise wouldn’t give him the time of day.

There is no way in a country of 340 million people to prevent such attempts at violence from those who cannot be successful at anything else, but who think that people now will have to “know me.”

Those committed to assassination prevention know that family or others’ providing the means for such miserable criminal-but-otherwise-nothings to murder others obviously can facilitate the acts themselves.  That is an avenue the criminal justice system should pursue. (READ MORE: Lies, Damned Lies, and Mass Shooting Statistics)

Please, though, no more searches for the motives of this miserable miscreant.  Unless investigators find unknown ties to unsavory groups or countries, he is not worth anyone’s time.

Jeffrey A. Ph.D. M.Ed., (ijas@me.com) is a psychologist and a retired professor of Justice, Law and Society at American University’s School of Public Affairs, and a retired member of the psychology faculty at Johns Hopkins University.  Dr. Schaler supervises existentially-oriented psychoanalysts and lives in Ellicott City, Md. Cell:  240-460-0987

Richard E. Vatz (rvatz@Towson.edu), Ph.D. is former psychology editor of USA Today Magazine.  He is a retired Towson University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Rhetoric and Communication. Cell 443-801-1281

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