Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspectin Saturday’s shooting, was registered as a Republican voter, according to Pennsylvania records.
Already the republicans are dismissing his voter registration as meaningless. Here comes the “mental illness” angle.
Edit: apparently it’s not uncommon to register with the party you oppose in PA. This is going to be a fun ride.
He definitely could be Republican and I would not dismiss it at all. However, in the state of Pennsylvania it’s common to register for the party primaries of the opposing party whose candidate is someone you’re not in favor of and vote for someone else. It should be clear this does not mean he’s not a Republican or imply that he might be a Democrat. It’s only to add some context.
Source: https://ballotpedia.org/Primary_elections_in_Pennsylvania
He also has donated to Democratic cause three years ago. Might not mean anything but we’ll see if they better figure out this guy.
If law enforcement sees a guy on a rooftop with a gun threatening a crowd of people, though, that’s an acceptable situation for “shoot first, ask questions later”. That shot that killed the guy probably saved other lives.
I wouldn’t say it’s common, that’s misleading. some people do it, probably, but I’ve lived in PA for 2 decades and have never met anyone who has claimed to do so nor have I seen any actual statistics on the matter
PA has a closed primary. In closed primaries, people tend to switch their registration in order to effect the primary they see as most impactful. It is not unlikely that the shooter registered as republican to vote against Trump in the primary.
Edit: Downvotes without explanation are fun…
He probably is a registered Republican. He’s a kid. His dad probably made him register Republican. His dad bought him the gun.
What are the odds he hates his father and blames Trump for turning his dad into a soft-brain conspiracy-minded dumbass, filled with hate?
I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial way, but I would not be surprised if this kid was a huge Trump fan. What better way to pump up the MAGA crowd than more bullshit to make it seem like some shadowy force was trying to stop him.
Right now the FBI has all of his friends and family in custody for interviews, the NSA is pulling all the comms info they have on him, his phone company is pulling what they have to provide…his entire life is going to get taken apart in very short order. What we actually get to see of that data probably is very little. I really hope what we need to see is disseminated quickly to not make the situation more murky.
There’s apparently a video of him saying he hates trump and republicans. It’s getting messy.
Yeah, blue shirt in the car.
That would be really bizarre if a dude that looks so much like the shooter was able to whip out a video so quickly. The only thing I couldn’t quite tell was that images of the shooter looks like he has an underbite almost, and the vid clip guy looks more normal.
Edit: found it. Allegedly someone called Maxwell Yearick?
E2:… ok. So looking up Maxwell Yearick gets things a little confusing. There are nsfw images of the deceased shooter that definitely look like he has the slight underbite/protruding lower jaw. Yearick is a protester who was arrested at a political demonstration and I don’t think he looks like the video guy at all nor do I think he looks like the deceased. Blue shirt guy looks closest, but we’ll have to see what shakes out of that.
There’s certainly going to be absolutely no end to that bullshit as well.
If it was a leg shot or a deliberate miss I could go for the conspiracy angle. But as it stands he was inches away from taking trumps life, which does not scream trump supporter to me.
A shot to the leg can cause significant bleeding and is often more deadly than say… headshots (see Gabbie Giffords).
Trained gunmen / soldiers shoot for the center-of-mass. In fact, its clear that Trump wasn’t struck by a bullet now but instead by glass shards. So some glass deflected the bullet out of the way.
I would imagine that the secret service men would have tourniquets and similar on hand to stop the bleeding.
Or the kid was just shooting at the teleprompter. Maybe he didn’t intend to shoot Trump. We’ll never know.
I know a guy who survived being shot in the head, he says doctors told him only 5% of people shot in the head survive and less recover as well as he has (he has minor issues, you’d never know if he didn’t have a dent and some metal in his skull.) Sure you can easily hit an artery in the leg and leg shots are for sure deadly too, but I wouldn’t say head shots are less deadly lol.
The training to aim center of mass is mainly because it is larger, if you’re familiar with The Patriot you may remember the scene where Mel and his small kids shoot at the British, he illustrates this point by saying “Remember, aim small miss small.”
Aiming for a larger target means you’re more likely to hit the target, and yes in modern times it means you’re more likely to get proper expansion of a hollow point, which means you’re less likely to shoot through him into a bystander. It also does just so happen that the A zone contains the heart and lungs, which are vital organs much like the brain. Head shots are “more deadly” if you hit, center of mass is more likely to hit a vital area rather than miss simply by virtue of being larger.
Apparently he was hit by shattered glass from the teleprompter being shot, not grazed by a bullet.
(Not that I buy the conspiracy angle. I think it makes far more sense that we have a dangerously polarized society and a lot of seriously unhappy young men who don’t know what to do with their anger. That leads to violence.)
I will say, as someone who lives in a state with closed primaries it is very common for someone to register for the opposite party to vote for whoever you think will lose. This particular election cycle it would make sense that dude may not exactly be so much pro Biden, but anti-Trump, so he registered as a republican to vote against him in the primaries.
I am anti-Trump as they come, but it doesn’t make sense that a republican would attempt to assassinate Trump. A lot of them may not like him, but they are a party of people that fall in line, not people that stand for what they believe is right. They are not selfless people that would give their life to protect the country from a facist. They are cowards that while they know it may not be right, at least he’s on “their side”. And let it play out.
You don’t vote in your least favored party to vote for who you want to lose. You vote for who in that party you genuinely want to win - so even if your favored party loses, the winning candidate is at least not a piece of shit. It’s an ad hoc way to do ranked choice.
This is why black voters in the south before the 60s frequently voted in the Democratic primaries despite the Republican party being less racist at the time; they could at least get an OK Democrat if they couldn’t get a Republican.
Everyone should be voting in the primaries of their least favored party until ranked choice voting can realistically happen.