Violence is Not the Only Solution: Why America's Epidemic of Craziness Demands Urgent Treatment
With the last week's attempt, there are three made on the life of great US president, Trump who survive another day to work for the country. Its plainly horrifying and entirely unacceptable. In just 18 months, these crazy people has plotted and executed 3 attempts means, the outburst action is tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath is the absolute hatred and disability to digest the great work which is going on. Otherwise, I won't pick up my gun, I won't plan well, I won't travel distance and I won't execute by putting my entire life at stake. This is serious problem of political hatred, amplified by senseless media and jobless people trying to kill a person in public life at highest level for 10 years. I remember people celebrating in bars like a biggest victory of their lives when a mugshot of President was taken and displayed on live TV. It is just an example and it is a daily ritual here - spewing hatred online, offline everywhere and normalizing such behavior as the content of the big iceberg while the tip of it will exhibit these hyper crazy executions. Agree or not, he is doing the greatest work for your country and the world and if you can't digest, stay calm. I knew half of the sane world including cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles votes against Trump and these educated men are the people who cannot discern what is good for the country and not. There are reputed media channels or news papers which runs articles or programs differing with Trump and criticizing him every hour and every day. Remember, he is the only public figure who takes on the bull by its horn. If you can't add strength to your president who else will. You need not agree with someone all the time, but at least change your attitudes. If you think someone is bad and deserves all the blame, courts will decide that, election results will decide that. In the end, stop spreading hate, don't try to take a life instead try to give life - an observation from an outsider and much more below.
There is a moment in the decline of a civilisation when the unthinkable becomes routine. America has not reached that point — but it is walking toward it with frightening speed. In the span of barely two years, a sitting president survived three attempts on his life, one of the country's most prominent conservative voices was shot dead on a university campus, and a Fortune 500 CEO was executed on a Manhattan street in broad daylight. Each of these incidents, taken alone, would constitute a national trauma requiring years of reckoning. Taken together, they represent something more alarming: a pattern — a society in which a growing number of its citizens have convinced themselves that murder is a legitimate instrument of political and ideological expression.
The most devastating part of this story is not the violence itself but the people committing it. These are not monsters dredged from the margins of society. They are, without exception, individuals of intelligence, education, and measurable promise — people who, by every conventional measure, had every reason to build constructive and meaningful lives. Understanding how they arrived at their terrible destinations is the first, indispensable step toward preventing the next one.
Three Attempts on a President
The first attempt came on a warm Saturday evening in July 2024 at a fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania. Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, climbed to the roof of a building adjacent to the rally grounds and fired eight rounds from an AR-15-style rifle at Donald Trump. Trump was struck in the upper right ear. A rally attendee, Corey Comperatore — a 50-year-old firefighter who shielded his family with his own body — was killed. Two others were critically injured.
Crooks had recently earned an associate's degree in engineering science and had been expected to enrol in university to study mechanical engineering in the autumn. Classmates remembered him as quiet, capable, and somewhat solitary. In the trunk of his car, investigators found a drone, two homemade bombs, and remote detonators capable of triggering them from over a thousand feet away. His motive was never definitively established — a silence that is itself the most chilling fact of the entire episode. A 20-year-old with genuine academic ability took a father's life and threw away his own, and investigators, after years of inquiry, could not fully explain why. Whatever darkness consumed Thomas Crooks, it completed its work before anyone — family, teachers, or institutions — could reach him.
The second attempt came eight weeks later. On September 15, 2024, a man armed with a rifle was found concealed in shrubbery at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Secret Service officers engaged the suspect, who fled and was later apprehended, and the FBI described its inquiry as an investigation into what appeared to be an attempted assassination. Unlike Crooks, Ryan Wesley Routh's motivation was explicitly ideological and his planning chillingly long-premeditated. An indictment revealed that he had been conspiring to carry out the assassination as early as February 2024 with an accomplice. He was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison.
The third attempt was the most brazen of all — and the perpetrator the most improbable. On the evening of April 25, 2026, at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner at the Washington Hilton — the first such event Trump had attended as a sitting president — gunshots were fired near the main security screening area. Trump, First Lady Melania, Vice President JD Vance, and members of the Cabinet were evacuated. One Secret Service officer was struck in his bullet-resistant vest and hospitalised, later released.
The suspect was Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance — a trained engineer who had once interned for NASA, developed video games, and worked as a part-time teacher and tutor. His LinkedIn described him as "a mechanical engineer and computer scientist by degree, independent game developer by experience, teacher by birth." He had attended the prestigious California Institute of Technology, later earned a master's degree in computer science, and had been named Teacher of the Month by his tutoring company, C2 Education, in December 2024. His computer science professor remembered him as "always sitting in the first row, paying attention, frequently emailing with coursework questions — soft-spoken, very polite, a good fellow."
Before the attack, Allen sent a note to his family that read: "Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused." The note stated he intended to target Trump administration officials and expressed his political rage, closing simply: "I don't expect forgiveness." A NASA intern. A beloved classroom teacher. On a cross-country train from Los Angeles to Washington with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives. Three attempts. Three very different men. One converging conclusion — that violence against a political leader was not just permissible but obligatory.
Two Killings That Shook the Nation
Between the second and third attempts on Trump, two other prominent Americans were murdered — and their killers shared the same chilling profile of wasted brilliance.
On December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot to death outside the New York Hilton Midtown, where he was walking to an annual investors' meeting. The words "delay," "deny," and "depose" — the tactics critics associate with insurance claim denials — were inscribed on the cartridge cases used in the shooting. The killing was premeditated and theatrical, designed to send a message as loudly as to end a life.
The killer was Luigi Mangione — and his profile demolished every comfortable assumption about what a murderer looks like. He was an Ivy League graduate and the valedictorian of his class at a prestigious Baltimore private school. His wealthy family owned country clubs and golf courses. Friends described him as humble and destined for a bright future. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania and founded a university gaming club that grew to over 50 members.
His diary entries lay bare a mind that had methodically constructed an ideological justification for murder. In August 2024, four months before the killing, he wrote: "I finally feel confident about what I will do. The details are coming together. And I don't feel any doubt about whether it's right or justified." He identified his target plainly: "The target is insurance. It checks every box." A gifted young man from a wealthy family had spent months transforming a legitimate grievance against a broken healthcare system into a cold-blooded plan to execute a specific human being — a father of two who had never met him. After the killing, UnitedHealth Group's Facebook condolence post received over 100,000 laughing reactions. The applause from the internet was perhaps as disturbing as the act itself.
Then came September 10, 2025. Conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was answering a student's question at an open-air amphitheater at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, when a single shot fired from approximately 175 yards struck him in the neck, killing him. The video spread instantly across social media, exposing millions to the moment of his death in real time.
The shooter was Tyler Robinson, 22 years old. He had graduated from high school with a 4.0 GPA and a near-perfect ACT score, received a substantial university scholarship, grew up in a family belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and took family holidays to the Grand Canyon, fishing and shooting with his parents, both registered Republicans. He was, by every measure, a boy raised in stability and decency. Friends and family told investigators that Robinson had become increasingly political in recent years, his views drifting leftward, radicalized — in the words of Utah Governor Spencer Cox — "in the dark corners of the internet." He had mentioned Kirk's upcoming campus visit at a family dinner. On the morning of the killing, Robinson climbed to a rooftop, fired once, then jumped off and fled, leaving the weapon hidden in a wooded area nearby. His parents recognised him from surveillance images released by authorities and helped facilitate his surrender. A scholarship student. A churchgoer. A boy who fished with his father. Destroyed — and destroying — before the age of 23.
The Common Thread No One Wants to Name
Look at these five individuals together — Crooks, Routh, Allen, Mangione, Robinson — and a pattern emerges that is impossible to dismiss. They are not uneducated. They are not economically desperate. They span both sides of the political spectrum. What unites them is something far more insidious: each had arrived at the conviction that the world around them was so irredeemably corrupt that lethal violence against a specific individual was not merely excusable but morally necessary. Each had constructed, through some combination of online immersion, ideological radicalisation, and deepening personal isolation, an inner world in which murder made logical sense.
This is the signature pathology of a specific and dangerous cultural moment — one in which political opponents are no longer rivals but enemies; in which outrage is not a spur to civic action but a substitute for it; in which social media algorithms have spent a decade feeding people the message that the other side is not just wrong but evil, not just to be defeated but destroyed. When that logic completes its journey through a sufficiently alienated mind, a rooftop in Pennsylvania becomes a sniper's post, a Manhattan sidewalk becomes an execution ground, a golf course becomes an ambush site, a black-tie dinner becomes a battlefield, and a university courtyard becomes a killing field.
A YouGov poll taken after Kirk's assassination found that 87 percent of Americans agreed that political violence is a serious problem — yet 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29 agreed that it "can sometimes be justified." Nearly one in four young Americans open to the principle of political violence is not a polling anomaly. It is a fire alarm.
The Prescription
None of this permits a single moment of partisan deflection. These killings and attempts came from both the left and the right. This is not a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It is an American problem — and it demands an American solution, which means it requires both sides of the political divide to agree, unconditionally and publicly, that no policy frustration, no ideological grievance, no righteous anger however legitimate, justifies the taking of a human life.
That agreement must begin in the digital spaces where these men were poisoned. Social media platforms have spent fifteen years engineering maximum emotional engagement — and maximum emotional engagement means maximum outrage. The algorithms that serve that outrage are not neutral forces of nature. They are accelerants, and they have helped transform a generation of intelligent, alienated young men into tinder waiting for a spark. Reforming those systems is not censorship. It is self-preservation.
It also requires communities — families, universities, churches, classrooms — to recognise the warning signs before they become headlines. Crooks was researching mass shootings and browsing gun websites months before Butler. Mangione had gone silent on social media while filling a private diary with murder plans. Robinson was speaking at family dinners about a specific man's upcoming campus visit with an intensity that, in retrospect, was a signal no one caught. These are not invisible trails. They are trails that no one followed in time.
America has survived worse ruptures than this. But surviving them required the country to look honestly at itself — to name the sickness without hiding behind party allegiance, reject the temptation to assign the pathology entirely to the other tribe, and commit collectively to the slow, unglamorous, necessary work of repair. Every one of the men described in this piece was, at some earlier point in his life, a reason for genuine hope. Every one of them was failed — by systems, by algorithms, by a culture that had made rage feel like righteousness — before he failed everyone else. That failure is not inevitable. But stopping it demands urgency, honesty, and the kind of national seriousness that, so far, America has not yet fully found the will to summon. It must find it now.
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