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.

229 points

My biggest hope now is that he legally purchased the gun with no background check from a maga at a gun show.

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178 points

You really think that any of the cultists are going to care about what actually happened?

Their story will be that he’s a transwoman high on legal weed who listened to woke podcasts about Gaza.

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96 points

A brave and true republican boy, who got corrupted away from his family by the antifa deep state complex, he would have been such a great person, if only his parents had homeschooled him without interference from the communist atheists, and were allowed to hit him more as a child 😢

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36 points

I should have saved it but I didn’t. Someone else posted an actual MAGoo fiction about how a good kid goes to college and instantly gets a hot Black girlfriend who corrupts him with sex and Antifa ideology…

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12 points

Then he got the covid vaxx and the 5g nano microchips got implanted in his brain and made him a deep state sleeper agent.

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5 points

It’s those damn FEMA reeducation camps

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27 points

You really think that any of the cultists are going to care about what actually happened?

No, but it might be enough to convince independents not to feel sympathy for him.

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32 points

Up until 2016 I could pretend to myself that, when the chips were down, most Americans could tell chicken salad from chicken shit.

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15 points

Anyone independent at this point is a moron.

Facts won’t matter. Facebook posts about deep state false flag operations will.

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11 points

Holy shit AND tried to assassinate a fascist? Why do they keep making up such fucking cool people

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7 points

The cultists are gonna cultist no matter what. Truth still matters even in a political and media landscape that looks to be ‘post-truth’. Don’t get me wrong, I wish it mattered a whole lot more still.

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3 points

When it was discovered Rittenhouse beat up a little girl, the story the Right made up was that the “Girl was a transgender who was spying on his sister in the bathroom!” when there’s no evidence for that claim.

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2 points

I didn’t know Rittenhouse had attacked a child; I’m not in the least surprised.

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Trump’s already not pro-gun. He passed some of the most significant “anti” gun legislation during his term. Thing is, he’s a pathological liar, so it doesn’t matter what comes out of his mouth. He’ll stay on the “pro-gun” rhetoric, and when he’s elected will enact more anti-gun legislation, especially now that he’s been on the receiving end.

And it won’t matter, because MAGA’s gonna MAGA. He’ll lose maybe a few truly 2A-focused people, but it won’t matter because after 2024 there will be no more free elections in the US.

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77 points

Trump’s already not pro-gun.

Point of order: Trump’s not anything except Pro-Trump. THAT’S IT. That is the sum total of his actual identifiable personal beliefs.

He’s a demented narcissist and a sociopath. He’s a rapist, a fraud, a money launderer for human traffickers, he’s a traitor, a colluder, and a piece of shit.

But he is absolutely NOT “not pro-gun”. He does not give a single solitary shit-in-a-vacuum. This has been proven. It Is Known.

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9 points

Once he has secured power the gun confiscations will begin. Classic power grab move.

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28 points

He was a responsible gun owner. They’re all responsible gun owners.

Until they’re not.

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2 points

Close, got it from his dad.

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163 points

People in this post thinking that any fact will matter to the MAGA base…

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39 points

Yup even if it turns out it was the father of one of the children trump raped, they won’t care.

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18 points

“ReGiSteReD RePuBliCaNs aRe AnTiFa!!!”

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11 points

MAGA will spin this… He was a plant, he was hired by Biden, he was a sleeper agent meant to sow discord in the GOP…

Whatever fox does with this story, the MAGA people will believe it.

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1 point

He was hired by Trump to miss, but “make it look good”, and killed for being a “loose end”

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120 points
*

Conservatives when a poc is convicted of rape:”if that was my daughter I’d happily be in JAIL now!”

Conservatives when their violent , rapist prez gets shot: “this is the democrats fault since they call him a fascist, let’s pull back the violent rhetoric peeps”

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32 points

Only that the “let’s” is referring to only Democrats. Republican/alt-right people will continue to use violent rhetoric.

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97 points

Crooks was supposedly wearing a shirt for a YT channel “Demolition Ranch” being called a pro-gun channel by the news. Quick scan of their content seems to indicate that guns are toys to be played with and how much destruction you can do with them.

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32 points

That’s one I had to stop my kid from watching because their gun safety is not non existent but is also not safe at all

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23 points

IIRC, DemoRanch uses (or at least used to) a portion of its income to run his Veterinarian clinic, but that is a few years old and it looks like he stepped back from the business in 2021? I fell off from most of YouTube before the pandemic, so I’m bummed but not surprised that he’s a Trump guy.

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27 points

Basically every single gun nut youtube is inherently right wing. Any content creator who actually gives a shit about humanity would have made MASSIVE changes following… ANY school shooting.

The best you can hope for is channels like Forgotten Weapons where Ian actively refuses to “be political”. He still lets his biases show any time he talks about legislation but he also has very clearly mocked a lot of the “loophole” devices and mostly comes across as a rich jerk talking about engineering. Or (funny enough) Carl at InRange who is 100% in the “useful idiot” category but seems to have a good heart.

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19 points

The YT algo also drives the content further right. I keep getting recommended Herrera’s channel, and if that’s the kind of stuff you’ve got to compete against for views, it’s just going to create a runaway phenomenon. If a tech literate, vaguely media literate leftist with a “mechanical porn” fetish can’t stop getting recommended Right-wing political gun garbage, then the average viewer doesn’t stand a chance…

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10 points

The closest thing I can think of to a non-right-wing gun nut YouTuber is Adam Savage. If course, most of his gun nuttery is centered on movie props, not real firearms.

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5 points
*

Or Paul Harrell or,

Massad Ayoub or,

Hickock45 or,

James Reeves or,

Honest Outlaw or,

Black Powder Maniac Shooter or,

MidwayUSA or,

Royal Armouries or,

Garand Thumb.

And those are only ones I’m subscribed to.

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21 points

I bailed on his channel when he started making comments about the George Floyd protests in his videos. It was always pretty clear what his beliefs are from a religious and political standpoint, but up to then, he never brought it into his videos.

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12 points

I think the channel is hilarious.

I also think the channel shows off WAY too much reckless, butthole puckering lack of safety. I’m actually surprised no one has gotten injured or killed.

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66 points
*

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.

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33 points

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.

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16 points

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.)

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2 points

The glass thing was to my knowledge reported by TMZ though more recent reporting does say the bullet grazed his ear.

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9 points

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.

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6 points

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.

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6 points

Or the kid was just shooting at the teleprompter. Maybe he didn’t intend to shoot Trump. We’ll never know.

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-1 points

I would imagine that the secret service men would have tourniquets and similar on hand to stop the bleeding.

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1 point

Read my comment again. The FIRST sentence specifically says I’m not going that way with my comment…

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18 points

There’s apparently a video of him saying he hates trump and republicans. It’s getting messy.

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36 points

That was by a lookalike from 4chan I thought, the blue shirt video?

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25 points

There’s certainly going to be absolutely no end to that bullshit as well.

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16 points

What’s surprising is how unsurprised I am by that shit. I didn’t read it and go, “No way, no one would do that!” Nope. As soon as I stumbled on it, I thought, “Well of course the chuds on 4chan did that.”

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5 points
*

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?

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3 points

So we should all watch Rogan and infowars because those guys will figure it all out just by “asking questions” /s

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