The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooting is scarcely worth mentioning. Unlike the Pennsylvania shooter, Mathew Cooke, the assailant, Cole Tomas Allen, didn’t even get past security–let alone take aim at the president. So in this sense, security was a success. I disagree with some commenters online who say that the Secret Service failed. The Secret Service will always be reactionary. Unless everyone in a vicinity is pre-screened, there will always be opportunities for bad actors to slip through. That said, compared to the 1980s and 1990s, ground security has improved considerably.
Similar to Luigi Mangione, the Left seems to be committed to the idea that their shooters are geniuses. Cole Allen is no exception, his Caltech credentials touted by the media to form a narrative of a misguided genius whose convictions got the best of him, and indeed he will be facing a lot of them as his trial commences. From The Atlantic:
Allen graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2017 and appears to have made a living as a test-prep tutor and college-admissions consultant. Caltech is a sort of nerd Valhalla, where brilliant and creative youngsters study and engage in prankish mischief. Despite being in California, it is not a Maoist redoubt. The only free radicals are in the chemistry labs. Twenty-six years ago, students treated a visit by then-President Bill Clinton as a challenge, and outwitted the Secret Service by secretly rigging a banner to unfurl at an inopportune moment. But mockery and mischief, not politics, were the point. The banner read IMPEACH NIXON.
Unfortunately, many on ‘the Right’ have also accepted uncritically that Cole Allen is a genius because he want to Caltech. If the average IQ of a Caltech graduate is 135, which is not an unreasonable assumption, then those on the low-end of the Bell Curve for a graduating class of 1,000 can be expected to have IQs of only 110-115 or so, accounting for a possible skew. This is above average, but not genius territory. It would not surprise me if his IQ is similarly at the low-end, which can explain his lack of career success after graduating. Or his simple manifesto, compared Ted Kaczenski, who was much more intellectually prolific and presumed to have an IQ in the 160s.
Selection effects also play a major role. I posit the type of person who is actually smart and patient enough to successfully pull off such a stunt, such as having the necessary operational security, is disinclined to want to throw it away on politically-motivated violence. Such individuals will have careers or other opportunities or ways to occupy themselves. Only in exceptional cases such as the Unabomber is genius applied to inflict maximum harm with surgical precision.
There are no useful, reliable predictors–e.g. upbringing, personality traits–for determining who is at risk of committing premeditated acts of violence. The reliability is too low owing to the rarity of examples. You look at recent examples such as Mathew Cooke, Tyler Robinson, Luigi Mangione, and now Cole Tomas Allen, and there are no consistent patterns. Attempts at mapping certain traits to susceptibility, amounts to nothing more than confirmation bias. Cole Tomas Allen is cast as a “failed genius,” Tyler as “radicalized by Discord,” Mathew Cooke as a loner, and Luigi Mangione–despite being well socialized and a University of Pennsylvania graduate–threw it away for motives that remain unclear. Archetypes stop being useful when there’s one to fit everyone.
A common thread, if there is one, is their backstories are so muddled and defy easy categorization. It’s like someone will be a well-functioning young adult, and without forewarning in span of a few months develop homicidal urges, and this narrow window leaves little room for intervention, and raises more questions than answers. The corpus of human psychology proves woefully inadequate, as is not surprising given the complexity and unpredictability of human behavior.