We still know so little about Thomas Matthew Crooks. Almost nothing. Not that we care, not really. Who was he, again? That was, what, whole weeks ago now? Who even remembers that?
Still, as Crooks enters the dismal company of American presidential assassins, attempted and actual, it would seem that we'd know something about him. But we don't. Not his motivations, not his precise state of mind, nothing about what drove him up onto that sloping rooftop. He'd have no lines to sing in a dark Sondheim musical.
But we do know a great deal about his rifle.
It's an "AR Style 556 rifle," or so the reports told us, which is a fairly vague description. That type of rifle is produced by scores and scores of manufacturers. There are hundreds of variants. Saying you were shot with an AR is like saying you were hit by an SUV. It could mean a whole range of things. It's almost meaningless.
What the AR is is the universal American rifle. It's utterly generic, the domestic equivalent of the Russian AK.
So we know that.
We also know, more significantly, when and why the specific rifle Crooks used was purchased. We know what makes that rifle unique.
That particular AR is just over a decade old, and was purchased by Thomas Matthew Crooks' father in 2013. Why was it purchased then? It was purchased then because, after the Sandy Hook massacre, there was a real push to ban such weapons. Sandy Hook was the massacre of twenty children between the ages of six and seven, along with six of their teachers, in the event you've forgotten. A mother, observing that her son was increasingly insane and obsessed with violence, decided that the best thing to do was purchase him a gun and take him to the range. She was the first to die. Then he went to his old elementary school.
In American gun culture, that horror did not cause a rethinking. It caused two things instead: first, denial, as the far-right refused to accept that such a thing could happen, and came up with an array of wildly false conspiracy theories, and; second, a panicked rush to buy ARs "before it was too late." Before they were banned. Before that right was well-regulated. The rifle used by Thomas Matthew Crooks that day in Pennsylvania was one of those rifles, purchased by a father of a then elementary-aged child. The ban, thanks to the Republican party and American gun culture, never happened.
So what does that rifle tell us? It doesn't speak, of course. It's just an inanimate object. But human cultures, idolatrous as they are, imbue such objects with totemic significance.
That specific rifle represents a particular type of mindset, and a particular spirit in our age. It's the spirit that sees a weapon used to butcher elementary school children, and says: "I must own that. I feel threatened unless I have that." It represents a spirit of fear, and a spirit of retributive violence, and a seductive spirit of pathological selfishness masquerading as liberty.
Following the assassination attempt, there was much rumbling on the far right about how "they" had tried to kill Trump. But as is so often the case when someone makes vague and ominous statements about "they" saying this or "they" doing that, what that person means is "I."
The through line from right-wing ideology and gun culture to that rifle is as bright and clear as a summer day in Pennsylvania.
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