The Two Beasts: How the Media Gets Every Shooting Wronghttps://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/08/31/the-two-beasts-how-the-media-gets-every-shooting-wrong-n4943197A shooting happens. Cue the circus. Cable anchors put on their solemn faces, politicians squeeze out their pre-written lines, and Twitter fills with keyboard prophets reading entrails like Roman augurs.
“Look! He liked Trump memes — clearly a right-wing terrorist!”
“No, he followed gender activists on TikTok — clearly a leftist lunatic!”
Both sides pound the table, as if the meaning of the carnage can be divined like tea leaves. ...
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Two Very Different Beasts
Not all shootings are the same. In fact, there are two broad types — and confusing them is like confusing a hurricane with an earthquake. Both kill, but they come from very different places.
Hate-Driven Shootings
Think of Dylann Roof, who walked into a Charleston church in 2015 and murdered nine people because they were black and Christian. Or Patrick Crusius, who drove to El Paso in 2019 and opened fire in a Walmart because Hispanics were shopping there. Or Audrey Hale, who stormed the Covenant School in Nashville in 2023 with a grudge against Christians. Or Robin Westman, who attacked a Catholic school in Minneapolis just last week.
The pattern is clear: the targets are interchangeable representatives of a hated group. ...
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Politically Motivated Shootings
Now compare that to the Alexandria baseball practice in 2017, when James Hodgkinson deliberately targeted Republican congressmen. Or the Butler, Pa., rally in 2024, where Thomas Crooks took aim at Donald Trump, grazing the candidate’s ear and murdering an innocent attendee behind him. Or the Minnesota attack in 2025, where a gunman ambushed state leaders Melissa Hortman and Erin Murphy, killing Hortman and her husband.
These shooters didn’t choose interchangeable targets. They tracked and hunted specific political figures because of their office or political aspirations. ...
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Why the Difference Matters
This distinction is not academic. Hate-driven shootings are the rotten fruit of alienation and untreated mental illness, wrapped in borrowed stories of grievance. Political shootings are assassination attempts — direct assaults on democracy itself. Both are deadly, but they demand different responses. Lumping them together into the partisan blame machine hides the truth and ensures we’ll keep failing to stop them.
If we’re serious about stopping these attacks, we have to stop pretending they’re all the same. Hate-driven shootings and political shootings are two different beasts. Treat them the same, and we fail twice.
Trying to squeeze the many shootings into some small ideology-defined box - as media and pols usually do - can't solve anything,
at best. Dealing with the shootings as sicknesses of human hearts is the starting point of any "solution". Realizing that, like the lightbulb in the famous joke about psychaitrists changing a light bulb, the heart-sick humans have to want to change (and therefore perfection is not possible) is important.
