Snip from the link:
Crooks conforms with some of the report’s broader trends: 86 percent were men, 77 percent White; more than half were single, and three in five had no children; most attempts were on presidents, members of Congress or other public figures being protected by the Secret Service.
In other ways, Crooks was anomalous. He was younger than the vast majority, few of whom were students at the time. Just 30 percent used rifles or shotguns, and only one in four traveled elsewhere in their state, or one beside it, in pursuit of their target. There’s little evidence, so far, that Crooks had a “history of resentments or grievances against others,” as 97 percent of those studied did.
And then there are the mass killers Crooks conjures. At a briefing with lawmakers, law enforcement officials shared that Crooks had researched Oxford High shooter Ethan Crumbley as well as his mother and father. Earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became
the first parents of a mass shooter ever convicted of homicide. In a rampage that ended the lives of four schoolmates in 2021, Crumbley, like Crooks, used a firearm that had been purchased by his father.
Crooks parallels the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter, Adam Lanza, in several obvious ways. Besides their ages, both were gaunt and withdrawn, with limited social circles. Both grew up in homes stocked with firearms and had a clear interest in them: Lanza, who aspired to become a Marine, studied guns and fired them with his mother at a shooting range; Crooks, who, investigators and reporters have learned, belonged to a shooting club and died in a T-shirt adorned with the logo of a popular YouTube channel dedicated to guns, had tried out for his
high school rifle team but did not make it because he was a poor marksman. Both 20-year-olds showed signs of rising distress — Crooks researched major depressive disorder on his phone, lawmakers were told — before their violent acts. And Lanza, too, committed his assault with a parent’s semiautomatic rifle.
www.defenseone.com
