The Most Frightening Shooters Are the Smart Ones

The line “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done” could probably have been written in an email to friends by any number of the attendees at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But the line was apparently written by a man who showed up with a shotgun and pistol and was ready to kill “most everyone” there to get to Donald Trump and assassinate him and his Cabinet. In a manifesto-like email that he reportedly sent to family minutes before allegedly shooting, Cole Tomas Allen wrote that the assembled journalists and machers “chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit.” Allen never came near the president or the gala floor. A Secret Service agent was shot in the vest before Allen was tackled and arrested.

Random acts of violence by unstable individuals are unfortunately a feature of modern life. The most frightening shooters are not these yahoos, but the smart ones—those who carefully plan, train, and choose their settings to inflict maximum damage. Think of Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 69 youngsters at a left-wing summer camp in Norway, or the Islamic State commandos who killed 90 music fans at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. The email attributed to Allen as well as the scant biographical details known about him suggest that he had the capacity to do much more harm than he did. But something proved defective in his plan or mind, and as a result, no one was killed.

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.

Allen’s email suggests a murderous obsession with Trump’s politics. Some people hate his policies, and say so, and can nonetheless dine among the very architects of those policies they deplore. Allen, a former member of Caltech’s Christian fellowship, subscribed to an unusual reading of Jesus’s commandment in the Sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek. “Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed,” he wrote in his email. “Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.” The crimes he had in mind included “a schoolkid blown up, or a child starved, or a teenage girl abused.”

The excerpts that have been published from this email so far, in The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, do not sound at all like the mad ranting that characterizes many of the encyclicals sent out by attempted assassins before their act. And Allen’s complaints, though too vague to assess individually, are indeed the sorts of things one might reasonably get worked up about. He wrote that he needed to do “something.” Many present at the Hilton last night thought something ought to be done, but only one thought that the reasonable reaction was to massacre the designers of these policies and those dining near them.

There are, of course, signs of disordered thinking, even in this email. Allen seemed to think he could shoot his way into the ballroom, past the Secret Service, with a shotgun. “In order to minimize casualties, I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls).” His understanding of ballistics is confused: Even buckshot will generally penetrate half a dozen interior walls. And the belief that he could cross through many hallways and dozens of yards of armed and trained men and women, without being taken out himself, speaks to a John Wick–like delusion that may yet prove clinical in origin. The photos of Allen restrained on the floor of the Hilton show an unusually scrawny man, his shoulder blades visible through the skin. Some people are just skinny. Some are skinny because they are unwell in other ways.

There is one point in his email that I must judge stark-raving sane. He notes that it was a simple matter to get a hotel room on the night of the banquet, and to bring his guns in. “If I was an Iranian agent,” he wrote, “I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce [.50-caliber machine gun] in here and no one would have noticed shit.” He continued with a note of civic concern. “This level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.”

When I first heard that shots had been fired at the dinner, I assumed that the attack was related to Iran and was repayment in kind for the wave of assassinations by the United States and Israel against Iranian leaders during the ongoing war. The United States in particular has been cautious about using this capability, and Iran—although happy to assassinate—has moderated use of this tool against Americans. The country has tried to kill American officials but has hired knuckleheads and incompetents because they are cheap and add a layer of deniability. Now that Iran’s enemies have aggressively targeted Iranian leaders, Iran might decide it will lose nothing by skipping the knuckleheads and sending its own best assassins. Allen is right to note that a competent assassination squad would find the job easier than one might hope. He was, thankfully, wrong to think that he was such a squad all by himself.