…and Fromme is more remembered for being a member of the Manson Family. Ford himself is already about as forgettable as Garfield or McKinley. Trump on the other hand…
He didn’t steal the rifle. He simply asked to borrow it.
ABC News learned that on the day of the shooting, Crooks told his father he wanted to go to a shooting range and asked if he could borrow his dad’s AR15-style rifle, said a source familiar with the matter. Since the father had occasionally allowed Crooks to go target shooting with the semiautomatic firearm, he didn’t think anything was suspicious when he let him use the rifle again on Saturday, the source said.
Or they’ve seen Unforgiven:
JOE
All I want to know is what son of a bitch shot him is all.
Was it one of those John-Bulls?BOB
Oh no, sir. I believe the would-be assassin to be of French ancestry,
or so it would seem. I don’t wish to give offense when I observe that
the French are known to be a race of as-sassins, though they can’t shoot
worth a damn. Any Frenchmen in the present company are excluded, of course.PASSENGER
Says here a fella by the name of Guiteau, G-U-I-T-JOE
Sure as hell sounds like a John Bull to me.
Thank you. I own 12. I have not purchased a single one of them. Basic stuff. No assault weapons. All inherited. I have thousands of rounds of .22LR because my father was SURE society would collapse because of Y2K. It would be a way to hunt very small game, or use as barter. I suppose that’s true.
I’m not gonna sell or give away my grandfathers .22 that is over 100 years old. It was handed down to me when I was 10yo. I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of some of the others. But will keep a few.
My husband and I have three guns: the one he bought himself, the one he bought for me, and the one he bought because he liked it more than the first one.
The one he usually carries is mine. 
My guess would be that this guy was bullied by Trump fans, some of whom may have been the rifle team guys who disdained his marksmanship. He decided that shooting Trump would be a good way to show them all, and/or end it all.
If/when his politics come out, I’m sure they will be an incoherent Rorshach blot. Lots of young people have incoherent politics, and I think this would go double for someone with Libertarian parents. So while we may learn a bit about his beliefs and preferences, I doubt we’ll learn that he was trying to achieve any specific political outcome.
He was a weak, bullied loser, and wanted to build himself up by killing the powerful guy idolized by his bullies. I doubt there’s much more to it than that.
Shrug, I think I would change it to purchasing 12 guns to classify someone as having a firearm fettish\being really into guns. I agree with you if you just inherited several guns then you don’t qualify. I agree with the prior poster on the line being about 5-6 guns.
It does seem really weird and unusual that the guy left no apparent statement of his motivation at all; not only no manifesto but no social media trail, no known extremist associates. I can’t think of a single other example of a political assassin leaving the world to wonder exactly what his beef was.
Agree. I think someone mentioned “school shooter” upthread - this seems more in line with that sort of thing than “political assassin”. Basically, the same story we have all sadly have become accustomed to (a nut case with a gun goes on a rampage), but this time with a high-profile person involved.
Whoops. I must be insane, because i have dozens. With an s. With five or six -s’s, even. Many are collectors items, some are for fun, some were inherited when my father- in- law moved into a retirement community…I also have a really big safe to lock them up in, of course. Not a hunter, but i like putting holes in paper to blow off steam.
Yeah, I’m not into guns, but if I were into them, I’d probably have a lot, because I tend to collect things that I’m into. It’s easy to say nobody needs a dozen different ARs, and while that’s true, it’s also true that I don’t need a dozen different Lego Star Wars spaceships, and yet here I am, surrounded by blocky TIE-Fighters.
In the internet era, I suppose you are correct.
Maybe he used a VPN and a big social media presence will be discovered in a few weeks. But, if not, we are looking more at a pre-web timeframe where it could take at least a few years for true crime authors to get the right interviews.
I’d be a little surprised if, say, five years from now, neither parent had been willing to talk to any journalist.
The longer the investigations, both police and journalistic, go on, the more people will have jumped to their own conclusions, and be unwilling to abandon them. But I think we will eventually know the motives.
I guess we need to define our terms. I think “into guns” and “gun fetish” are pretty closely related, although the latter obviously has a more negative connotation. Sure, a lot of people have 12 or more guns. But most are not, as far as I can tell, casual gun owners. They are gun enthusiasts.
OK… Doesn’t change anything.
Yeah, an enthusiast to me is someone who likes putting holes in paper, and has a number of ways to do that. A fetishist seems more like the guy dressed in camo exercising his right to open carry at the grocery store. I think there is a difference, and the number of guns is not a great indicator - unless it gets to the point where someone has an arsenal larger than the local police.
Which is why this is the most perfect 2020s-era-America event. Trump wasn’t shot by some political lunatic, just by a fucked up kid who shouldn’t have had easy access to a gun - as generic as it gets. And the crowd chanting “USA!” as chaos unfolded was the chef’s kiss.
He was 20 years old, so if his little manifesto is anywhere, it’s probably on his phone. I don’t think the FBI has released any info about the contents, only that they had ‘cracked’ it.
That’s not quite right either. I do have 12 guns. I’m certainly not enthusiastic about them. They are tools. Given to me. Nothing else.
Knowing how they work does not make you a gun enthusiast any more than knowing how to cook makes you a food enthusiast.
I was just correcting inaccurate information. We do that sort of thing around here.
Late in her life, my mom remarried. We were kind of long in the tooth, and no one thought we should call him step-father. If we had to say something that identified where he was in the family, he was Mom’s husband.
When he was younger, he had hunted and fished. He had also done pistol target shooting at an Olympic or near-Olympic level. He had a bunch of rifles and pistols, just like he had a bunch of fishing rods. I think it was mostly a matter of being able to upgrade when he got raises or promotions, and partly a matter of what was available. Although he may have inherited a couple.
He died before Mom did. When we costed out his pistols as part of Mom’s estate, one was markedly pricier than the rest. There were more than 20 firearms in his collection at the end.
He wasn’t any sort of gun fetishist. To him, guns were tools and having good tools made jobs easier. In fact, he also had multiples of other tools and multiple work tables in the garage.