On 13 July 2024, twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on a political rally for former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one spectator and wounding others including the President. Crooks fired at least six shots with a semiautomatic rifle from the roof of a nearby building before he was neutralized by Secret Service snipers.
As images of a triumphant and minorly bloodied Trump surfaced online, President Joe Biden quickly condemned the attack, stating there is ‘no place in America for this kind of violence,’ ignoring how mass violence is uniquely American in both execution and prevalence. Crooks hailed from Bethel Park, a small town in neighbouring Allegheny County. Journalists were instinctively drawn to Crooks’ former high school to question alumni about the would-be assassin. One classmate had it that Crooks was a loner bullied for wearing army fatigues, while another sympathetically responded that Crooks was highly intelligent and mild-mannered. The latter added, ‘This is one of the things that is being misconstrued – he was not some type of loner trench coat wearer,’ alluding to the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. While he was ‘nerdy, for sure,’ Crooks never ‘gave off that he was creepy or like a school shooter.’
The impulse to contextualize Crooks through the iconography of historical mass violence highlights the importance of establishing a cultural-historical framework around its perpetrators. My own research reassesses the Columbine High School massacre as an act of far-right domestic terrorism. I argue that Columbine’s historical legacy as the mould for contemporary mass violence necessitates a socio-cultural historical analysis of its perpetrators’ motives and ideology. Evidence left behind by Harris and Klebold reveals the attack drew inspiration from Nazi Germany, the Oklahoma City bombing, and far-right paramilitary culture. Before settling on Columbine High School as the centre of the attack, they expressed a wish to bomb ‘half of Denver’ or ‘crash a plane into NYC.’ Eric Harris stated in one of many manifestos, ‘I want to leave a lasting impression of the world.’
However, the attack lost the cultural-historical imagery of indiscriminate violence when Harris and Klebold’s homemade bombs failed to detonate in their high school cafeteria, forcing the teens to go on a rampage shooting inside their school. Harris and Klebold’s unprecedented media attention was in part because its death toll dramatically exceeded previous attempts at school violence, killing twelve classmates and a teacher toward whom they harboured no personal vendetta, before committing suicide. However, its legacy was determined by its intense iconographic power; as Harris and Klebold’s distinct personalities, subcultural interests, and aesthetic expressions (so much of which was purposefully expressed in the rampage itself) produced textual and visual shorthand for acts of mass violence. Through Columbine, the young and disenfranchised obtained a language to exercise authority, infamy, and immortality. Having come of age in the post-Columbine generation, Crooks showed interest in school shootings and likely emulated the visual and textual power of the modern-historical mass shooter. Correspondingly, the cachet of the political assassin has dwindled since its mid-to-late-century heyday. Arthur Bremer, who attempted the assassination of far-right Senator George Wallace in 1972, was immortalized as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, but John Hinckley Jr.’s capping President Ronald Reagan to impress upon Taxi Driver star Jodie Foster in 1981 stole at least some of the assassin trade’s valour. In Taxi Driver, a comedy of errors finds Travis Bickle lauded as a hero by the end, notwithstanding his quasi-political scheme to assassinate the senator. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold became underdog icons for alienated youth in the same right.
Violent crime evolves with the fluidity of other social phenomena. Prominent expressions wax and wane in their popularity in tandem with social mores and cultural trends. Like all cultural texts, the school—and mass — shooting phenomenon seems to exist in a tireless semiotic process of production and reproduction. It should be viewed as subcultural expression, not because the perpetrator is on the fringes of society, but because the act itself explicitly protests hegemony. Spontaneous mass murder is unique, committed for the sole purpose of its message. The perpetrator seeks to make a statement about themselves as they reject society. Victims are not selected out of personal gripes and more often than not have no relation to the perpetrator, however, like the normalcy of the Columbine community exemplified American suburban life, the targeted location or event can hold tremendous symbolic power. Like Lee Harvey Oswald did with John F Kennedy in 1963 or James Huberty with his neighbourhood McDonald’s restaurant in 1984, Thomas Matthew Crooks sought immortality by striking at the heart of American culture. Conversely, mass murderer James Holmes profusely insisted that his act of violence ‘had no message.’ Holmes chose a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises at his local movie theatre instead of Denver International Airport, another prospective target, because airports had ‘too much of a terrorist history.’ Although Holmes was in the grips of psychosis, he too comprehended the symbolism assigned to sites of mass violence. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who discussed Columbine with his biographers while awaiting execution, put it plainly, ‘You need to hurt them where they hurt the most.’
Our limited but telling information in the shooting’s immediate aftermath give insight to Crooks’ hare-brained quest for infamy. Details disclosed by the FBI lay bare a premeditated wish to harm masses of people. Alongside internet logs showing a long-standing interest in school shootings, Crooks had recently purchased explosives cache and brought homemade bombs to the rally – similar to the failed mass bombing at Columbine which prompted the infamous shooting rampage. The digital age democratizes infamy, providing incentive to seek out a high-profiled event captured on livestream so well as satellite trucks. Crooks’ internet history suggests research on the 2024 Democratic National Convention and rallies for President Joe Biden. On 3 July, local news announced that the Butler County fairgrounds would host a rally for Donald Trump, giving Crooks ample opportunity to achieve his goal, a mere thirty minutes away from home.
To Crooks — as to Harris and Klebold, or McVeigh — personal death was an accepted price to pay for immortality. Watching the news break on Columbine, McVeigh ruminated on the future of mass violence, ‘Gen X, Gen Y: this line represents the escalation of teen violence, the lessening of moral values, and decrease in concern over death. Look at those kids at Columbine, they just killed themselves, right?’ McVeigh referred to his execution by the state, like the murder-suicides of Harris and Klebold, as ‘an elaborate suicide-by-cop.’ He speculated that we would see more of this in the future, predicting with eerie precision the fate of Trump’s would-be assassin. Within the cultural-historical canon of assassinations and mass shootings, the focus of the Trump rally shooting was Thomas Matthew Crooks, not former president Donald Trump. Moving away from its immediate visual impression, a rooftop sniper aiming at a controversial political figure and said politico resurfacing from the crowd a martyr, and into the acts of violence the perpetrator intended to emulate, its historical roots become clearer. Donald Trump’s minor injury martyrdom, nicely befitting the cult of personality central to his platform, consequently, loses political significance. Crooks likely had no personal vendetta against Trump, at most pulling the trigger on the disgruntled ex-president to disguise his quest for notoriety as an act of vigilantism for the American left.
Violence as vernacular evolves sure as all cultural tastes, but in the case of mass violence, two constants remain: the victims’ insignificance to the perpetrator beyond their power they evoke as symbols en masse; and the perpetrator’s desire to be remembered for an iconic act. Crooks exemplifies that the perpetrator is not necessarily angry with society but understands that targeting icons of American culture – ‘hurting them where they hurt most’ – is a form of emancipation from society. In so doing, they state that they are above all else. The spectacle of killing others is valued over personal death, and posthumous othering as a mass murderer is accepted in the quest for a legacy. Perhaps as ironic as Travis Bickle’s rise to stardom in Taxi Driver, Crooks’ poor marksmanship generated a new and powerful iconography for his target, not himself. Images of Trump’s triumph in the face of a shadowy adversary are sure to be tirelessly reproduced by the MAGA movement, promoting Trump as the ultimate underdog. Meanwhile, initiatives like the No Notoriety campaign advocate for the anonymity of mass violence perpetrators in the media, reducing copycat crims and diminishing incentive to go out in a ‘blaze of glory.’ Whereas the Harrises, Klebolds, and McVeighs of the world remain synonymous with acts of mass violence, the name Thomas Matthew Crooks will go down as synonymous with bad aim.
