Then, on Monday, Aaron Sibarium of the Free Beacon reported that the FBI is investigating a series of social-media posts published in advance of Kirk’s assassination that “appeared to indicate foreknowledge” of the shooting. Several of those accounts appear to be run by transgender individuals, and at least one of them apparently followed Robinson’s trans roommate on TikTok, Sibarium reported.

Among the most hyperbolic polemics on the Right about this quickly shifting story are those from Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh, who took to X over the weekend to declare: “Transgenderism is a death cult.” He added that “trans militants” are “inherently violent” and insisted that the “threat they pose is very serious.” Then there was Donald Trump Jr., who before the shooter was identified, said in an interview with Fox News, “I can’t frankly name a mass shooting in the last year or two in America that wasn’t committed by a transgender lunatic that’s been pumped up on probably hormones since they were 3-year-olds.” (Donald Jr.’s grasp of the age a minor might start hormone therapy, even at the outer limits, is wildly inaccurate.)

It’s obviously tempting for some on the Right to claim Kirk’s murder as a general indictment of trans people — and equally, for their opponents on the Left, to fervently deny any connection between violence and trans identities. A better society, however, would tread carefully. Science on trans issues has indeed been politicised, not least by trans activists, but this is no reason to give up on it. Everyone is left poorer by each side’s rigidity and refusal to examine the facts.

Let’s start with the claim that transgender people are more likely to be mass shooters. Such figures are difficult to assess, since comparisons depend on a morass of diffuse and distortable data, including the definition of mass shooting and the size of the trans population. In fact, Kirk’s last words — “Including gang violence?” — addressed the issue of how difficult it is to define these matters, in response to a question from a student at Utah Valley University.

Assessing the per capita mass-shooting rate for trans people is also challenging, given the increasingly broad definition of what it means to be transgender and the inability for authorities to determine each shooter’s gender identity; such uncertainty leaves the door open for both sides of this issue to juice the numbers in favour of their preferred conclusion. Also, the population of trans youth has been growing faster than data analysts can necessarily keep up.

Caveats aside, the day before Kirk’s assassination, PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking organisation, published an examination of the claim that trans people are disproportionately represented in the mass-shooter population and found no evidence to support it. PolitiFact examined Gun Violence Archive data and determined that seven out of 4,147, or 0.17%, of mass shootings since 2018 were committed by people with a trans or nonbinary identity.

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PolitiFact calculated the mass shootings tally fairly broadly, which means it both included gang-violence incidents as well as the shooting at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in August, which resulted in two deaths not including the perpetrator. According to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, considered the most reliable source of such data, about 1% of the overall US population identifies as trans or nonbinary; and among adolescents and young adults, the figure is just above 3%. So simply comparing those admittedly very rough figures, the claim that there is a disproportionate mass-murder trend among trans people is not supported by the evidence.

Importantly, there have been no academic studies that have analysed the available data to produce an estimate of the per-capita rates of mass shootings among trans people versus other demographics.

As for what the psychological research shows about whether trans people are more prone to violence, there’s a similar dearth of information. Researchers such as Amy Tishelman, a psychology professor at Boston College and one of the leading experts in the care of young people with gender dysphoria, suggest the reverse is largely true. “Youth who identify as transgender are actually more likely to experience internalising symptoms — anxiety, depression — than externalising symptoms, including aggression and violence,” she told me.

A Finnish study published in 2021 did find that transgender youth were more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of bullying. But overwhelmingly, the available scholarship has established that this population is disproportionately victimised, subjected to physical violence, bullying, dating violence, and forced sex.

What is abundantly clear is that the quickly ballooning population of youths with gender dysphoria also typically suffer from a host of other major psychiatric conditions. A 2021 paper found that, compared with their siblings, trans youth receiving care from military services from 2010 to 2018 were five times as likely to have a mental-health diagnosis. A 2018 paper found 30% to 50% of trans and gender-questioning youth reported a recent suicide attempt, compared with 18% of girls and 10% of boys. And a 2015 study of a Boston community health center found that, compared with matched controls of youth who were not trans, trans youth were three to four times more likely to have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, to have experienced suicidal ideation, and to have engaged in self-harm.

Irrespective of their gender identities, this is a remarkably troubled population of young people. And it is substantial. According to Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, between 2017 and 2023, some 320,000 to 400,000 minors received a gender-dysphoria-related diagnosis.

Interpreting these research findings to address the question of any greater potential for violence moves into the realm of speculation. Tishelman raised the question of whether there is a certain stratum of people who are indeed prone to violence and who profess to be transgender but who are not in fact genuinely trans. The Minneapolis shooter, after all, confessed in a diary entry shortly before the incident to regretting transitioning. 

This line of thinking rests in part on the fact that the profile of youth with gender-related distress has undergone a sea change. A generation ago, cross-sex identification among minors was very rare, and the youth who presented to mental-health professionals with what was then known as gender-identity disorder had lower rates of other psychiatric diagnoses than what is seen today, according to research by Canadian psychologist Ken Zucker and his colleagues.

Since then, profound cultural shifts have taken place in swift succession. In 2007, Boston Children’s Hospital became the first American clinic to offer puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat paediatric gender dysphoria. The Occupy Wall Street movement, in 2011, heralded the dawning of the social-justice-warrior era, which saw dramatically overhauled mores about sex and gender among progressives in particular. And during the early 2010s, children first became exposed to smartphone-based social media, opening them to a new realm of online identity exploration and expression as well as myriad unprecedented hazards.

As psychologist Erica Anderson, who specialises in caring for youth with gender dysphoria, told me, “It changed from kids that I saw as likely persistently trans, and who didn’t have flagrant coexisting psychiatric problems, to a heterogeneity of cases and kids who clearly had psychiatric issues that needed, in my opinion, to be treated before we could sort out the gender issues.” She continued: “The appropriation of the word trans has come to include people who would not have been characterised as trans 10 years ago and would not have been encouraged to medicalise.” 

Almost all of the trans shooters included in the PolitiFact tally were under 30 and thus part of the surge in trans identification among youths that began in the early 2010s. 

All this is to say that while we obviously have a mass-shooter problem, there is no clear scientific basis to argue that it is a trans mass-shooter problem. There are too many other complicating factors at play.

Leading researchers have been eager to sweepingly blame the poor mental health of gender-dysphoric people on what’s known as minority stress, or the suffering spawned by stigma and mistreatment regarding an individual’s trans identity. This theory is similar to many others that color the progressive approach to societal problems: that external, or so-called structural, factors are overwhelmingly, or exclusively, to blame for disparate negative outcomes among disadvantaged populations. 

When applied to people with gender dysphoria, minority-stress theory is predicated on the notion that a trans identity is a fixed facet of the inner self and that hostility directed at that identity unidirectionally causes internal suffering. Leaders of the paediatric gender care field have fervently denied that trans identities are ever a product of social influence. 

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It may, however, be time to distinguish between the subgroups under the trans umbrella, and to acknowledge, as many detransitioners have attested, that factors outside of brain wiring could possibly lead some people to identify as transgender. Have some youth adopted a trans identity as part of a deeper psychopathology that is itself tied to violence? Is this identity misdirection being fuelled by an internet culture that foments violence and also intersects with spaces where young people cultivate their gender identities? Enterprising — and brave — researchers might consider addressing these admittedly hazardous questions.  

To do so could lend credence to a theory that is anathema in paediatric gender medicine: that for some, asserting a trans identity may be a maladaptive coping mechanism and a distraction from a deeper wellspring of psychological distress. If this is true, then at least in some cases, gender-transition treatment and surgeries might only exacerbate the individual’s struggles with mental health. 

“What’s totally unhelpful and unproductive, not to say petty and just false, is to say that anybody who identifies as trans is inherently a threat, and should be regarded as such,” Sapir told me. The question, he noted, is how to grapple with any possible connection between violence and a portion of the trans population without resorting to trans hatred. “To focus only on the people who actually pull the trigger, and not on all the systemic causes that enable and encourage that type of behaviour seems to be totally unhelpful,” Sapir said. 

Sapir faulted many trans activists for being what he called “agents of pessimism.” These activists, he said, tell their followers, “‘Your life sucks, the world hates you.’” Even amid aggressive pushback by the Trump administration against the goals of transgender activism, Sapir insisted such messaging is hyperbolic and that it could be radicalising.

Psychologist Erica Anderson added that when it comes to transgender issues, “too much of the chatter online is polemical, over-generalises, and demonises ‘the other side.’” She expressed concern that “someone who is seeing themselves as a victim and feels that they have an identified enemy may be more likely to lash out.”

Trans activists would no doubt characterise such a view as blaming the victim. However, the one thing science — and the epidemic of mass shootings of all types tell us — is that we have a generation of youth, trans and otherwise, in desperate need of better care. We should not be afraid to ask questions and answer them diligently with science in service of protecting both their well-being and society at large. 

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder yesterday, on the campus of Utah Valley University (UVU), pundits will again call for “national conversations” on toning down political rhetoric, rethinking gun rights, and addressing the increasing mental imbalance of Gen Z and younger generations. Some of these calls for dialogue may be in earnest. But few will go deep enough to touch the raw violence embedded in the American political imagination, which has come to believe differences of opinion are a threat to personal survival. And so, after a few news cycles, nothing, as always, will change. As Ian MacKaye of seminal punk band Fugazi once put it, “there’s no movement in a bad mind”.

Kirk, while highly combative and snark-driven online, was reportedly kind and generous in private — a devoted husband, a loyal friend, and an attentive father. A bad man he was not. But a bad mind is something else entirely. Kirk’s death, like his rise to fame, is the product of a culture war so entrenched, over issues so narrow but also so intransigent, that it now threatens to consume the republic. And in that frame, the place of Kirk’s death matters: not just as a backdrop, but as a symbol of how horridly intolerant and stupid we’ve all become. For Kirk was shot in Orem, Utah, at an event hosted on the campus of UVU — a site highly reflective of the culture war, and one I know intimately, having been born and raised in nearby Holladay.

Utah is far more than red rocks, Mormon temples, and the Osmonds. It’s also a mirror of the national divide, a perfect microcosm of America’s fractured soul. Despite what most people think, Salt Lake City and its surrounding county are solidly blue, aggressively secular, and its residents often go well out of their way to prove their progressive bonafides, not only to outsiders but to themselves. Today, five of the city’s seven council members identify as LGBTQ. The legislature that governs them, however, is dominated by arch-conservative rural and suburban counties — devoutly Mormon, heavily armed, and firmly in the grip of a Right-wing mentality that has less to do with the actual teachings of Joseph Smith and more the influence of Fox News and superficial online influencers like Kirk.

Orem and the UVU campus sit on the fault line between these two worlds. The relationship between Salt Lake’s progressive political class and Utah’s conservative rural bloc is not just adversarial. At times, it can feel borderline psychotic. The two groups do indeed want to hurt one another. Even when basic cooperation would obviously benefit both sides, hostility generally triumphs. Last year, for instance, Utah lost the Sundance Film Festival, a major cultural and economic engine. This didn’t happen because it was unprofitable, or poorly run, but because the state legislature refused to offer even modest tax concessions which they would do in almost any other similar circumstance. But punishing urban “libs” was more important than protecting local film workers, tourism jobs, or small business revenue. This isn’t dysfunction, it’s deliberate sabotage, waged in the name of cultural purity. And that’s what makes Utah such a stark lens for understanding Kirk’s shooting.

I’ve witnessed these tensions firsthand. Twenty years ago, I served as the communications director and speechwriter for former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson — one of the most combative local politicians in recent memory. He was, in his way, the Left’s version of Trump, totally abrasive, pugnacious, and completely uninterested in diplomacy of any kind. But he won reelection and was, again, very recently chosen as a top-two candidate for Salt Lake City mayor despite now being in his 70s.

Anderson’s popularity endured because he knew exactly what his base wanted in their heart of hearts — someone willing to take on the Mormon Church and the Republican legislature with unrelenting, theatrical aggression. In Utah, there was never a shortage of culture war material. Anderson fed the beast constantly blasting the LDSs, telling The Guardian they were “Taliban-like”. It may seem like an odd move for a Salt Lake mayor but, believe me, it was a deliberate choice, and the city’s electorate loved it.

The more the mayor condemned Utah conservatives, the more popular he became. We talked about it openly several times. I attempted to steer his rhetoric to a more compromising tone, but was vehemently rebuffed on every occasion. UVU sits right on the fault line — the literal and political divide — between deep-blue Salt Lake County and the hard-red Utah County to the south. I think it’s no coincidence, in other words, that Kirk was killed at this particular intersection. Already, some on the Right have speculated, without evidence, that the shooter must be a trans activist. That narrative will almost certainly gain traction once it becomes more widely known just how deeply LGBTQ advocacy groups dominate Salt Lake City and county politics. In fact, moments before the shooting, someone in the crowd reportedly asked Kirk, “How many of the mass shooters were trans?”

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While that possibility can’t yet be ruled out — especially when the Wall Street Journal reports that the shooter’s bullets may have been engraved with expressions of trans ideology — yet more scapegoating won’t solve the deeper issues that led to Kirk’s killing. The causes are both local and national, but at every level the problem is uniquely American. For if Utah’s deep polarization speaks to a national malaise, giving people ample causes to kill for, these partisan divides are vast and widening right across the Western world. The difference, as the dreadful clips of Kirk’s shooting so vividly shows, is that would-be murderers in the United States can also lean on the vagaries of the Second Amendment.

I’m hardly the first to say this, but guns are everywhere here, something that burrows to the heart of why US citizens tolerate, and even normalize, levels of gun violence that would be unthinkable in any other wealthy nation. More to the point, they’re accessible even to the deeply mentally ill and those with violent criminal records. Decarlos Brown, whose own mother tried to have him committed, infamously stabbed Iryna Zarutska on that Charlotte train last month. But given the laxity of the laws, he could just as easily have shot her. As a show of ideological purity, indeed, many red states have spent the last two decades dismantling even the most basic restrictions on gun ownership. Charlie Kirk was a vocal supporter of that movement. Utah is emblematic of the trend, and the consequences were visible well before Kirk’s murder.

In June, at the “No Kings” rally in Salt Lake City, a man was seen near the edge of the crowd assembling an AR-15 rifle. In true Middle-American fashion, several designated “peacekeepers”, many of them armed themselves, opened fire, believing they were stopping a mass shooting in real time. The man was shot and injured. But so too was an innocent bystander, killed in the crossfire of this chaotic, DIY version of public safety.

Well before anyone pulled a trigger, several rallygoers had already called 911 to report the man and his weapon. Dispatchers told them there was nothing they could do. Their hands were tied — because, in Utah, it’s entirely legal to brandish a loaded assault rifle in public, even at a political rally. In 2021, the state also eliminated its permit requirement for concealed carry. Residents can now carry firearms openly or hidden without a license, training, or any oversight whatsoever.

Anyone 21 and over who can lawfully possess a firearm, which, in Utah, is basically anyone without a criminal record, is completely free to carry a loaded, hidden firearm in public. That’s why the man assembling an assault rifle at the Salt Lake rally couldn’t be arrested until he actually opened fire. The psychological toll of living in such a society — where you can see someone preparing for a massacre and still be told “nothing can be done” — cannot be overstated. Again, I know these fears myself. Years ago, while teaching at the University of Utah, I had undergraduates show up to my office hours with pistols visibly strapped to their chests. Like the rally goers, I was legally unable to do anything — not even refuse to meet with the armed students. The university had attempted to ban firearms on campus, but the legislature sued and won.

A few years later, while teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, one of my undergraduates submitted an essay describing, in graphic detail, a fantasy in which he murdered his professor and then the rest of the class. Even if I had reported the paper, it wouldn’t have led to any firearms being confiscated. Not under Texas law, and definitely not under Utah’s. In 2018, Utah legislators briefly considered a bill that would have allowed courts to issue protective orders removing firearms from individuals deemed “severely mentally ill” or “violent, unstable”. But the bill was quietly stalled in committee and permitted to die. It has never been meaningfully revisited.

Despite the fantasies of the NRA and other pro-gun groups perversely proclaiming “an armed society is a polite society”, for the aware individual living amid this culture of gun fanaticism, the experience often feels quite different. For, if firearms are allowed everywhere, the reality is that you — and your family — might not be safe anywhere, which only feeds the need many feel to further arm themselves, literally and emotionally, in preparation for battle. Charlie Kirk might have been completely earnest in his desire to have good faith debates in public. But in America’s culture of violence and embrace of mostly unnecessary economic insecurity, very few young people are interested in debate of any kind today.

There’s an argument to be made, then, that the collective anxiety sparked by America’s culture of guns encourages political polarization, and vice versa. The woke Left might be off the rails on issues of race and gender. Progressives might frequently overreach in their attempts to play national therapist. But the American pro-gun movement is just as unhinged — if not more so. The derangement of America’s pro-gun obsession has taken on an almost cultic character. It’s ideological, absolutist, and soaked in a kind of religious fatalism. Indeed, when you combine this fanaticism with the fact that many of its most devout adherents also call themselves “Christians”, it becomes hard not to draw comparisons to Islamism. Either way, the idea that America’s mass shooting epidemic is somehow not a direct consequence of our carte-blanche right to bear arms, and the gun lobby’s relentless campaign to eliminate even modest restrictions, is straightforwardly absurd.

This year alone, there have already been 309 mass shootings in the US. That’s an average of nearly 1.3 per day. Again, firearms in themselves are not surely the only factor here. As the grim example of Decarlos Brown implies, too many dangerous people are allowed to roam the streets, pampered by a naively utopian justice system. But if the closure of dozens of psychotic hospitals over recent decades is clearly a problem, as is the fact that even habitual offenders are not locked up, it’s hard not to return, again and again, to the question of guns and who is allowed to own them.

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Among US adults, after all, 1.5-2% of the population experience hallucinations, delusions, or other severe psychotic symptoms. Out of a population of roughly 330-40 million people, that equals around five or six million people — nearly all of whom can arm themselves and take shots at innocent children or public figures they dislike, should the voices in their head instruct them to do so. Examined in its totality, it’s actually surprising there aren’t far more mass shootings and assassinations in the United States, though even the number that do happen are shocking enough.

Just turn on the news. Less than an hour after Charlie Kirk was shot, another school shooting unfolded in Evergreen, Colorado. One teenager was killed and two others seriously wounded. The day before that, six people were shot in San Francisco. Two days earlier, in Cleveland, another six were injured, including a 16-year-old boy shot in the teeth. It hasn’t even been a full two weeks since the massacre at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, where dozens of people, most of them elementary school children, were shot down in church. Two children were confirmed dead, but the final death toll could easily have been in the dozens, all in a country that continues to produce over 70% of the developed world’s mass shootings, year after year, without pause.

Two years ago, at a public event held not long after the Nashville school shooting — in which three children and three adults were killed by a non-binary assailant — Kirk was asked whether the mounting body count had shaken his faith in the Second Amendment. He gave an answer that was appalling in its content, but admirable for its consistency. “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty,” he said. “You’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. I think it’s worth it. Some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

One must admit, Kirk lived his values right up to the moment an assassin’s bullet pierced his neck. But in 10 years, or 20, will his widow and young children see things the same way? That, in the end, is the real cost of America’s death bargain. It’s easy to call tragedy the cost of “freedom” when the corpses aren’t your own. But, as Ian MacKaye knew, there’s no movement in a bad mind. And today, as Kirk becomes a martyr for the online Right, America feels increasingly overrun by bad minds, and still wholly unwilling to admit the obvious.

The apprehension of 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Monday offered the uncanny feeling of American murder adapting to the latest American moment, the way music or fashion update themselves as society and culture change. Just over a month after Donald Trump stunned liberals by sweeping the White House and the Senate, thus proclaiming the triumph of “regular” Americans over “elites”, here comes this scion of a wealthy Baltimore real-estate family. Mangione is the product, as both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal declared in banner headlines, of an “Ivy League” school, as well as having been the valedictorian of an exclusive prep school. His victim, Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, was, on the other hand, a regular guy, the product of a public high school — where he was also a valedictorian, but to the media’s indifference — and a state university. Depending on your perspective, the moral advantage goes either to the Elites — Mangione struck a blow for the common man — or to the Regulars — a decent-seeming father of two was cut down by the misguided morality of an addled Elite.

That Mangione was caught in a working-class Pennsylvania town, sitting in a McDonald’s, where he was recognised by a customer and reported to the police by an employee, seems the stuff of well-rounded tragedy. Both Harris and Trump, if you recall, laid claim to working at McDonald’s, Harris solemnly, Trump archly, in order to (absurdly) demonstrate their working-class bona fides. And here was a rogue Elite doing the folk-hero work of Regulars, turned in by a Regular, as if to remind the Elites — not to mention the burgeoning new elite of vindictive Regulars — of good old-fashioned law and human decency.

“Senseless” is an epithet almost invariably attached to “murder”, but not in the case of an assassination, which is, by definition, not senseless. The victim of an assassination is a public figure whose public status rests on a public significance. Still American presidents have often been assassinated, or attempts have been made to assassinate them, by proverbial “loners” and “outsiders” who don’t seem guided by a coherent purpose, à la Oswald, Sirhan, and Hinckley. Indeed, the template for the insoluble enigma of an American assassination remains the murder of JFK, an event that encompassed the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the CIA, the KGB, the Dallas underworld and, well, you name it.

Mangione’s alleged murder of Brian Thompson seems, on the surface, to be perhaps the most rational assassination in American history. To the extent that Mangione is now, ghoulishly, being celebrated as a folk hero, the motive for his killing, declared by Mangione himself, seems to be simple and, in the manner of a folk hero, humane. In this view, Thompson presided over a healthcare company that denied life-saving, or at least, precious life-enabling care to thousands of people. As Mangione put it in a Goodreads review — a first; an American assassin writes book reviews — of a book by Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.”

You recall the finale of The Insider, that dazzling movie about Jeffrey Wigand, the whistleblower who brought down American’s tobacco companies. Wigand’s vindication, his triumph over both the tobacco companies and the craven corporate captains at CBS who wanted to suppress the airing of his story, is portrayed as happening just as the FBI is moving in to arrest Kaczynski in his remote cabin in the Montana wilderness. The movie’s implied message seems to be: either you permit people like Wigand to speak the truth or, not allowing that form of communication to prevail, violence will come.

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“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.” Ukraine. Gaza. Lebanon. The coming apocalypse in Syria’s recently liberated charnel-house. These are places where people pray for history’s violence to stop. In American pop culture, however, there is no happy ending without violence. Consider the Wicked Witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Crushed as she is by, as it were, America’s falling housing market, all that is left is her shoes. And now consider the current Wicked, in which the Wicked Witch of The Wizard of Oz becomes uncomfortably humanised as a sort of domestic terrorist battered and bruised into a fighter for social justice.

A vigilante, if you will. Not unlike Mangione or, for that matter, Daniel Penny, the ex-Marine whose trial on a homicide charge in lower Manhattan ended in acquittal just as Mangione was being captured. Mangione allegedly murdered Thompson as revenge for heartless healthcare policies. Penny, a jury concluded, accidentally killed a black homeless man on the subway he was restraining because Penny believed that the man was about to harm, or kill, passengers on the train. No one seems to be in charge in America. So Penny takes charge. Mangione takes charge. As for the rest of us, we assert our own control by telling ourselves, and each other, conflicting stories about who is responsible for what.

And so we try to give Mangione a story. He has, it turns out, an uncomfortably humanising context that might help explain his turn toward social isolation and murder. It was chilling to learn that he suffered from an excruciating back condition. He allegedly shot Thompson first in the calf, where back pain often radiates to, and then in the back. Was that his cruelly symbolic way of taking revenge for his healthcare company? Or, perhaps, along the lines of the narcissistic personality that is the dominant psychological type of our day, he could bear his pain only by making another person experience it.

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The back pain, according to the owner of an exclusive Hawaii hostel where Mangione stayed, prevented Mangione from having intimate physical relations, for a lengthy period of time anyway. He was lovelorn. His first doom came in the form of a flirtatious smile with a desk clerk at a hostel in Manhattan, a smile for which Mangione fatally lowered his face mask, thereby giving police a crucial picture of him. His second doom was that pair of striking, entirely distinctive eyebrows, two saber flourishes above a Cyrano nose. A true cold-blooded revolutionary would have radically trimmed or dyed them, in order to thwart attempts to identify him. But those eyebrows seemed to mean more to the young Mangione than corrupt power, social injustice and starting a revolution put together. When the police approached him in McDonald’s, they reported, the Goodreads fan of Kaczynski turned pale and began to shake.

“We are what we hide,” said Malraux. Mangione, the most handsome, sensual-looking, socially and professionally successful incel in America. The truth is, no one will ever understand why Mangione killed Thompson. Least of all Mangione. As for the manifesto the police found in his backpack as an explanation of his crime, when has anyone’s explanation of their own motives borne the slightest resemblance to their true motives?

Between wanting to kill someone and actually killing them is a wilderness made of impenetrable human matter. Just as no person or entity, poet, philosopher, scientist or AI, will ever figure out how brain became mind, no one will ever know why someone, Ivy Leaguer or social outcast, becomes a killer. “But that’s no matter—,” as Fitzgerald wrote in the concluding lines of Gatsby, “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning…” Americans will keep searching for the meaning of America in the actions of every American assassin in hopes that one fine morning they will find it. But in the same way that the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx is another perplexity— “a human being” — the disturbing answer to the riddle of America posed by America’s highest-profile murderers will always be another riddle: a killer.