Bump Stock
"You got me jerkin' back and forth" - Devo
America dodged one on July 13th when a twenty year old boy grazed his target's ear in the process of committing suicide-by-cop. He likely just wanted a dramatic ending for a life he felt was miserable. It probably was.
Had Trump been killed we might well be in the opening days of a hot civil war. Most news and authorities would not call it that. But there would be retaliatory political violence, followed by crackdowns and online goading, followed by more violence provoking more attacks, in a quickening upward spiral. Each explosion triggering the next. Violence led by gun-cultured people far better trained and armed than the leftist extremists snarling behind their keyboards about the “one job” this kid had and failed to do. People on all sides letting their mouths write checks their butts are unwilling or unable to cash. Followed by an election.
The would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was another bullied loner with a gun. Three years ago at the age of 17 he sent fifteen bucks to a Democratic get-out-the-vote campaign. One year after that he reached voting age and chose to register as a Republican even though the Democrats he had supported won the White House. Two years further on he chose to take his father’s AR-15 and shoot his chosen Republican party’s candidate for president. Only this kid knows why. He apparently left no statement. He had been practicing at a local gun range for a year. He liked chess, wore camo to school, and searched online for information on “major depressive disorder.” His parents are psychotherapists.1
His father should be prosecuted for failing to secure his gun. If Trump is elected, though, he would likely exonerate the father for such charges in a cheap but magnanimous gesture which would play well to the gun-owners who love him.
The kid himself should be pitied as much as reviled. Have you ever been forced to go sit each day in a room where you know you will be abused because you are intellectually gifted? Have you been a hormone-addled adolescent with unlimited pornography, violence, and conspiracy theories available 24/7 in your free hand? Have you ever thought you found a hero only to learn you were very wrong? Have you ever wanted to just somehow end it all? Many have. American culture put a gun in this kid’s hand and showed him what to do.
On more than one occasion since moving back to Montana I have overheard orders being placed for thousands of ammunition rounds, even tens of thousands in one case, at one of our local sporting goods stores. Like most Mountain West towns of any size we have several shops where you can buy all the guns, ammo, laser sites, and accessories you can afford. Frightened and angry people will pay what it takes to feel safer and in control. Whether they end up actually safer or in greater control is not part of the equation. Purchasing decisions are emotional. Most subjective reality is driven by how we feel not how we think. The capitalist economy knows this. So much so that the media has evolved into a twenty-four envy, lust, and terror show, even though violent crime in the USA has been in steady decline for decades. Products, including politicians, are sold by massaging people’s limbic systems.
This past year, SCOTUS legalized a formerly banned device called a “bump stock.” A bump stock turns a semi-automatic rifle (one bullet per trigger pull) into an automatic rifle (continuous fire until trigger release). The recoil from each bullet causes the trigger to be “bumped,” or pulled again, resulting in continuous fire until the shooter stops or runs out their ammo. Each explosion triggers the next until something intervenes.
No one should fool themselves about whether civil war is possible here in America. We can buy sniper rifles, concealed carry holsters, and every manner of pistol at a standard sporting goods store. In many places no license or background check are needed. Just money, and cash is king. We can buy shotguns that will remove the top half of a human body. We can buy aerial surveillance drones with infrared detection. We can buy bags of yard fertilizer to make Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and dig into the dark web to figure out where to find some rocket-launchers or build our own. A local sporting club "slash" militia could easily acquire the same basic arsenal the Taliban and Mujahideen used to fend off Russia and the USA for fifty years in mountains of Afghanistan. I have zero doubt there are large arsenals tucked away within a few miles of my home and hundreds more scattered across the state. All of them legal, more or less.
I respect the traditional role of game hunting and sport shooting in American culture. I also want to live in a nation that rejects political violence and peacefully transfers power. Democrats are much less likely to own guns than Republicans. I tend to hang out with more Democrats than Republicans, though I have issues with both parties. If a civil war happens I know which side will lose more lives: mine.
A few years ago I noticed that any time Trump did something particularly obnoxious several of my Trump-loving friends and family — I have many — would suddenly pop up in my social media feeds saying something provocative. Almost as if (as if?) Meta has tuned its algorithms specifically to start arguments and cause social conflict. This same behavior happened last week. Within hours of Trump being shot, a childhood classmate showed up at the top of my social feed blaming the attack on Biden and the Democrats. More and similar have shown up since. These folks virtually never appear in my social feed until Trump is snarling extra-hard about Democrats. If and when these same folks post nice things about nice people, I am not shown those posts. Yet now here they are, every day for days in a row, spreading racist and sexist comments about Kamala Harris and claiming that blood on Trump’s right ear means God has anointed him to save Israel.
TwiXter, Facegram, and Tok-Suey make sure I see posts like these. They spread them to provoke me into a chain reaction of increasingly intense engagement. He posts this, so I post that, and on and on. Sure, I could “unfriend” these people. But, that’s not the point. The point is that the social media corporations are using all they know about us — which is a lot — to actively provoke arguments while daring us to look away.
Social media thrives on emotional intensity. Humans are biologically evolved to hunt and gather. We did this out on the savannas for hundreds of thousands of years before we invented agriculture and writing. So, our nervous systems reward us with little hits of the happiness hormone, dopamine, each time we hunt and gather something we like. It keeps us hunting. These days, that hunt is usually just scrolling on our phone to gather some funny video reel. But, for each of these finds we still get a quick little dopamine hit. Only a quick and little one, though, so we go back to scrolling for the next hit, all the while teaching the algorithms about everything we “like.”
This is why smartphone users stare at our phones so much. We are dopamine addicts. Each successful find makes us crave the next one. So we keep scrolling.
Scrolling and finding (hunting and gathering) is a highly addictive process. The social media companies know this. They design for it. The media pushers carefully dole out limited access to the things we have told them, in great detail over many years, that we “like,” to keep us glued to our screens, scrolling for more. Turning our addiction into money by selling our glued eyeballs to their customers. Our eyeballs are their product.
Democrats have lost a lot of ground since Obama. Pew Research says registered Democrats and registered Republicans are now evenly divided. What gets elided in such reports, though, is the plurality far larger than either party: all of us hidden behind the word lean. Political orgs like Pew tend to wrap everyone who admits to leaning one way or another into the nearest tribal banner, Team Red or Team Blue. This helps foster an illusion that our two parties actually represent independent voters. Organizations like Pew tend to avoid ascribing identity and agency to those who hold views more complex than either party represents. Our independence, expressed through a willingness to negotiate and seek solutions, is dismissed as “mysterious.”
I want to believe we can pull the bump stock off society. That we can stop jerking back and forth, each side reacting against the other. I want to believe people can strongly disagree without wishing to put a bullet in someone’s head. American culture caused Thomas Matthew Crooks and too many other shooters. An American culture which now expresses itself largely via social media, at least by volume. Still, we are all part of society, every one of us, even if our socializing is limited to old style chatter in the grocery line or coffee shop. Both of which are places where I never hear the sneering, goading nastiness social media corporations place in my face every day.
Thomas Matthew Crooks (September 20, 2003 – July 13, 2024)
I heard one set of analysis that concluded the shooter had more in common with a school shooter (ie columbine, uvalde, etc), than a political shooting (Reagan, RFK, JFK). I wonder how the intersection with rage reward from social media and dissociative experiences for young (usually men) in adolescence can help explain these rare and yet all too common outcomes? I love striking up random grocery store chats, complimenting people’s outfits, hair, etc. I keep trying to get my dopamine hots from hunting and gathering opportunities to make others smile. I fail- I rage scroll with the worst of us. But keep trying.