Opinion: A Shooting in Pennsylvania, a Lesson for Our Country

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

At a Trump 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, an apparently lone gunman aimed multiple shots at President Trump, fortunately only grazing the President but killing one attendee and seriously injuring two others in the audience, before the Secret Service brought him down.

Our reactions are varied, as they must be.

We are relieved that President Trump survived and that the shooter was killed. We are saddened that our society has come to this, that a 20-year-old’s mind has been poisoned enough to believe that Donald Trump, out of all the politicians of the age, is somehow a villain in today’s drama. We mourn the loss of Corey Comperatore, a brave fire commissioner who was killed shielding his wife and daughter, and we pray for the quick and full recovery of David Dutch and James Copenhaver, the two other attendees injured by the assassin’s bullets.

But as the visceral reactions abate, we must turn our focus toward the serious political issues brought to the forefront by this moment of terror.

Security

There are two reasons why most politicians don’t hold massive rallies like President Trump does.

Obviously, most politicians don’t draw crowds like he does; most politicians aren’t charismatic enough to fill such events.

But the other reason is important too: they can be extremely difficult to secure.

Security at such venues is usually a combination between federal and local parties; at big outdoor events, the Secret Service and local city or county police might collaborate, sometimes along with whatever private security the venue itself may have, with the Secret Service taking the lead.

As soon as the Butler shooting unfolded, the internet was dominated by cellphone video of people attempting to draw the attention of security to a gunman climbing onto an unsecured roof, 400 feet from the President. Videos show security forces setting up and slowly preparing to aim, apparently not ready to shoot until the shooter had already fired a blast of shots in quick succession toward the stage.

Were the security forces slow to respond, or are we misinterpreting the videos? Were forces on the ground really dismissive or uninterested when rally attendees attempted to alert them to the gunman, or were they just confident that their colleagues were already handling the situation? And why wasn’t the gunman’s location, an obvious vantage point from which to launch such an attack, already secured by the security details?

Monday morning quarterbacking is easy and sometimes unfair, but there are plenty of red flags here that merit an investigation, and the U.S. House of Representatives announced its intent to convene hearings immediately.

Anyone who attends concerts nowadays is used to being searched upon arrival; political events like this always scan the area looking for any elevated position that might be used for such an attack. It is inconceivable that this roof was unnoticed by the advance team. Why then was it available to the shooter?

This incident practically jumps off the page as a possible inside job, but Occam’s Razor would tell us that incompetence might explain it easily enough. As unacceptable a response as that may be, the fact is that the Secret Service is currently headed by a DEI hire who has made it her top priority to “diversify” the agency. Including in our tall President’s detail a female security guard a foot shorter than the candidate she’s supposed to guard, for example, would support the theory that this is more incompetence than insurrection.

But then again, the Secret Service has – for several months now – repeatedly refused the requests, of both President Trump’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s campaigns, to provide their public events with adequate security. The DEI cultist director has been quoted as saying it’s not her job “to provide security for nightclubs.”

You don’t have to arrange an assassination at all, do you, if you just routinely provide insufficient security to a campaign, eliminate most incarcerations of guilty criminals from coast to coast, invite millions of unvetted foreigners into the country every year, and then be patient enough for nature to take its course.

The Gunman

At this writing, the confirmed gunman was a 20-year-old misfit, about whom very little is known. He is reported to have made a small online donation of $15 to ActBlue on January 20, 2021 when he was still in high school. He was using his father’s rifle and had explosives in his car. He was a registered to vote as a Republican.

From this miniscule bit of information, some are trying to draw conclusions, but that’s dangerous nowadays.

We know that hundreds of thousands of liberal Democrats register as Republican each primary season for an array of reasons, most recently, for example, to cast a primary vote for Nikki Haley over Donald Trump. We also know that many voter registrations are automated (usually by the driver’s license process), and also that many are completely fraudulent, so it’s even possible that he didn’t register to vote, but it was done in his name, so we just don’t really know anything certain from this factoid.

The peculiar, single $15 left-wing donation is even less telling. Sure, that’s an amount low enough that’s it’s possible a high school junior could have contributed it. But we have also learned in recent years, especially thanks to the investigative journalism of James O’Keefe, that one of the Left’s favored techniques for hiding illegal or over-the-limit campaign contributions is to break them up and attribute them in tiny allocations to thousands of names of random volunteers, donors, or even just names pulled out of the phone book.

So, these limited data points really tell us nothing at all about the deceased shooter.

The one thing we do know is that something, or someone, convinced him that President Trump is evil enough to be worth killing. And that is the question that should concern us.

Politicians talk about putting a candidate or a campaign “in the crosshairs” or “on a target” all the time; it’s campaign rhetoric that usually shouldn’t be taken seriously as a threat.

But the non-threatening language used about President Trump, and about the “MAGA movement” in general, and even about conservatives or Republicans, is something to watch.

For eight straight years, the voices of the Left – their politicians, their teachers, their pundits, their pop culture icons – have been shouting that President Trump is “killing democracy,” that he’s an “authoritarian ruler,” that another term would “bring back Nazi tactics,” that he and his people are “right wing bigots.”

Not only are all these claims completely untrue – they are in fact outlandish libels in every way – but they may well be far more incendiary than Maxine Waters’ calls for violence in the streets and Kathy Griffin’s famous pose holding the severed head of a Trump mask, dripping with blood.

Our children are raised to regret that no private citizens in Germany had the presence of mind to assassinate Adolf Hitler a century ago, and now they go and tell a generation of impressionable children that President Trump is another Hitler in the making.

Again, you don’t have to organize an assassination; you can just let nature take its course.

Our education system teaches that limited government populism is no different from Naziism (the National Socialism of 20th century Germany). Students aren’t taught what socialism is; to what extent can we blame them for believing the outrageous lies our taxpayer-funded teachers have force-fed them all their lives?

If we learn anything from the story of Thomas Matthew Crooks, perhaps it is the fact that the round-the-clock demonization of Republicans – these constant lies about Republican policies, motives, and methods – may itself be, to some impressionable minds, as much of an incitement to commit violent acts as a direct order would be.

What, after all, has been the modus operandi of the islamic jihadists, especially in recent decades? Teach their children in the madrassahs and mosques that their enemies (the Jews, the Christians, the Americans, whoever they feel like attacking) are evil, abusive, subhuman – and eventually, given the opportunity, their radicalized operatives will go “lone wolf” when they see an opportunity. They don’t need to receive a direct order.

It’s too early to know if Thomas Matthew Crooks was part of a conspiracy or if he acted alone; there’s evidence pointing either way.

But it’s easy to imagine how, after hearing nothing but “Trump is evil” from all directions for as long as he can remember, he might have read a news story, and thought “Donald Trump’s gonna be just 20 miles away? Maybe this is my chance to make a difference!”

By rightly telling our children that Hitler was a monster – without telling them exactly what policies made him a monster, or correctly teaching them what other ideologies there are in the world and who holds them – our society has made anyone a potential target whom the Left chooses to smear with the Nazi label.

This was already the most important presidential election of our lifetimes before Saturday’s terror. The attempted assassination in Butler just reminded us of even more reasons why.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo