The Charlie Kirk shooting suspect

While few details are coming from official sources (reportedly, Tyler Robinson is "not cooperating with law enforcement," meaning he's exercising his Fifth Amendment rights), the media is interviewing anyone who so much as saw Robinson at any time from his birth to the present. So we're learning that he was a Groyper, a furry, a MAGA, that his roommate (with whom he may or may not have been in a relationship with) was transitioning from male to female, that his family was MAGA but he "rebelled" against them, that he had become very political in recent years, that he wasn't political at all, that he shot Kirk because Kirk was conservative, or because he wasn't conservative enough - whatever narrative you need to support your preferred conclusion, you can find something to back it up. And this doesn't even touch on the conspiracy theories - Trump ordered it because Kirk was demanding the release of the Epstein files, the Mossad killed him because he was "questioning Israel" in his final weeks, that his own team of bodyguards took him out with a shot from a few feet away, that it was a squib and Kirk faked his own death, and I'm sure others that I haven't seen yet that are even more unhinged.

The reaction from conservative lawmakers and pundits right after Kirk's assassination, that it was "the Democrats" before the shooter was even caught, set the tone. Everyone is desperate to pin the assassination on the other side as "proof" that their side is reasonable and peaceful, while their opponents are violent extremists who must be suppressed. This is nothing more than guilt by association. His "debates" on college campuses notwithstanding, Kirk was a gleeful participant in the demonization of liberals and the Democratic party, and did his part in increasing the polarization in the U.S. If a prominent liberal influencer had been killed instead, I have no doubt that Kirk would have been one of the conservative voices making light of the incident (as he did after the attack on Paul Pelosi) while also saying that the victim had it coming.

It's possible we'll never know the shooter's motivations, and unless somebody hired him to shoot Kirk, it really doesn't matter what they were. From what I can tell, he fits the pattern that so many assassins of prominent figures have - a troubled young white man with no coherent philosophy that can be nailed down, failure to fulfill his potential, and some degree of mental illness. This would describe Lee Harvey Oswald, the would-be Trump assassin, the killers of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, Reagan's shooter John Hinckley, John Lennon's killer, Gabby Giffords' shooter, and many others. People make fun of the response "how are we as a society failing these young men," but it's a reasonable question. There aren't that many purely political assassins; the ones that come to mind are John Wilkes Booth, Sirhan Sirhan, and the Puerto Rican nationalists who attempted to kill Harry Truman. Trump's shooter reportedly considered going after Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi; the only reason he targeted Trump was because Trump happened to be holding a rally near where he lived. Robinson lived close to where Kirk was speaking. Maybe we'll learn that he also considered killing Ben Shapiro or Zohran Mamdani, and only shot Kirk out of convenience. In the end, maybe all he wanted was to be famous and the subject of discussion; if that's the case, he achieved it.