Framing Violence

The latest public shooting

Content warning: This piece contains frank and detailed discussion and descriptions of violence.

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is what you love.

-Sappho (translation by Anne Carson from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho)

He’s always like this, Secretary. He’s always like this. Distorts the information given to him, then claims he’s been given the wrong information.

-Frank Kafka, The Castle (translated by Mark Harman)

There is very little to add to the current reporting on Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who fired shots at former president Trump this weekend, and who ultimately killed one person, injured several others, and then died from bullets fired by a Secret Service sniper.

Everything about this event is tragic, and there is no need to rank the tragedies.

News reports have variously painted Crooks as a victim of bullies (a claim which has been repeatedly contradicted), as a content loner with a small social circle, as a registered Republican who donated to a “progressive cause” around the last election (in response to a post asking whether viewers would watch the inauguration), as apolitical, as a political assassin, as an “organized” shooter who may have simply wanted to carry out a shooting and found the Trump rally to be a convenient location.

In other words, we don’t really know anything about Crooks except that he attempted to murder at least one person, the former president, and perhaps intended to murder many more.