The reason I think that it wasn’t politically motivated is because, we have this poor kid that has been bullied every day for years.

In the usual run of things in the US this would just be another school shooting. But those are so passé now days.

To be truly remembered and immortalised you shoot the loudest bully in the world.

This got deleted from unpopular opinions, reason is justifying violence. Just a note, I’m not trying to justify what Thomas did, just speculating on his motivations.

  • enkers@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’m not entirely sure this reasoning makes sense. Take, for example, a politician that is only motivated to be in politics because he wants fame. Does this mean that none of his actions are politically motivated because his true motives are apolitical?

    It seems to me that the act of choosing a political target, in and of itself, is a political motivation, as the political landscape has been the main informant of their decision.

    I can see some merit to your argument, though, and perhaps I’m being overly focused on semantics?

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
      0·
      1 year ago

      John Hinkley wasn’t politically motivated, he was just trying to impress Jodi Foster (If I remember right - whoever his Hollywood fantasy crush was).

    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nzOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I get what you are trying to say; even if it is not political, it ends up being political just because of the target. The motivations of Thomas no longer matter.

      The media is screaming at the top of its lungs that this was a politically motivated shooting, I’m just not convinced that it was.

      Where is his unhinged manifesto posted on 4chan, or anything overtly political about this guy? I saw @Zerlyna@lemmy.world posted a screenshot from reddit/twitter about “ending Epsteins’ evil empire”; that could very well be his entire motivation.

      • enkers@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        1 year ago

        Yeah exactly.

        I guess the implication of my argument would be that you couldn’t have a nonpolitically motivated assassination of a politician unless the motivations were purely on a personal level, and in that case we’d just call it a murder anyways, not an assassination.

        It’d make the whole concept of a “nonpolitical motivated assassination” an oxymoron, and I’m not sure that makes much sense either.