Matthew Thomas Crooks, age 20, who attempted to assassinate former president Trump on July 13, resembles–with his shy, mischievous grin, pale skin, and acne–countless young males who have sat in front of me in English classrooms over the years–at community colleges, in high schools, and even those in middle schools, as Crooks looks very young in his photo, now published all over national and international media. When schools shut down in March 2020 and bureaucrats destroyed communities, Crooks was 16, in the spring of his sophomore year of high school.
Absent from discussions of Crooks’ tragedy are the despair, losses, and mental health crises Covid-era lockdowns caused especially young people; the cruel, vitriolic, and even violent rhetoric pervading our culture in the last several years; and the effects of video gaming on young people’s brains, worsened by the predatory gaming industry and the increase in gaming addictions during Covid lockdowns.
Crooks was a computer gamer and a shy student, whom acquaintances have said was bullied and often sat alone at lunch. How might the last four years of cultural collapse have exacerbated Crook’s challenges? I am not hearing from any commentators across the US airwaves even mentioning Covid-era devastation to the lives of young people.
An epidemic of mental health crises struck young people ages 18 to 25, according to the CDC and other sources, with more than 25 percent in this age group saying they seriously considered suicide during the Covid period. Students endured months of computer school and social isolation.
In school reopening plans I read and saw enacted, bureaucrats required students to mask their faces, ordered them to sit six feet apart to eat lunch, and, at many schools, disallowed them from eating with friends. High school students could only remove masks long enough to chew their food. These bizarre practices depressed even the heartiest students. What effect did they have on Crooks?
Instead of hard discussions of what actually may have led to Crooks’ violence and suicidal actions, we read obfuscations, evasions, and vagaries. With unbelievably vague abstractions and verbose, dehumanizing language that would make George Orwell cringe, John Cohen, “Former Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis and Counterterrorism Coordinator and ABC News contributor,” drains the blood and life from this young man, the firefighter he killed, and the people he wounded. He completely omits the harms of the last few years as well as the increasingly vitriolic political language dominating US airwaves.
“The individuals who exhibit the behavioral characteristics this shooter is exhibiting go into the attack not expecting to survive,” Cohen says. “Some behavioral characteristics that have come to light already is that this is an individual who clearly suffered challenges in developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships,” said Cohen, a bureaucrat, who probably never missed a paycheck during the Covid period, and says nothing about the harms of lockdowns to young people.
In plain language: A young man shot people. He was someone’s son, someone’s student. He killed a firefighter, Corey Comperatore, and injured others, including a presidential candidate. Then a government agent shot him in the head, killing him instantly.
Students may have endured a learned helplessness when month and after month, isolation, fear, and restrictive policies, and bizarre practices did not abate. But in video games, especially the violent ones with shooting and killing, gamers are part of a community, perhaps a combat team. You may be a killer, an assassin, a hero. But these are fake worlds. How many hours of video games did Crooks play? And what kinds? The shutdowns and lockdowns forced young people inside, and for some, gaming hours relieved pain, stress, boredom, and purposelessness.
Gaming addiction worsened during pandemic shutdowns with game usage nearly doubling from 2019 to 2022 in males, 15 -24, according to an August 13, 2023 report in the New York Post. Mental harms from computer gaming have not received nearly enough attention, especially during the Covid era. In 2018, the World Health Organization officially voted to adopt the latest edition of its International Classification of Diseases, or ICD, to include an entry on “gaming disorder” as a behavioral addiction. People playing online combat games may have observable changes in their speech patterns, behavior, and impulsive control. Immersed in the game, they often claim they can’t leave the game.
While playing combat video games, players’ clipped rapid-fire speech patterns resemble those in the Collateral Murder video, released by Julian Assange on Wikileaks, and for which the US government Assange wanted in prison. In 2007, US soldiers in an Apache helicopter killed several Iraqi people, including two Reuters journalists. Former US soldier, Ethan McCord, who arrived after the attack and saved two children, has said that such occurrences during the US-led war in Iraq were common.
Most people don’t know what is in the video games Crooks may have played, but games change young people’s brains, and their makers design them to be highly addictive. Harms have been so pervasive that support networks and treatment centers have increased, including groups for family and friends of those addicted.
Support groups for addicted gamers describe hiding routers and cables from teens or young adults, who compulsively try to regain internet access. Teens break into car trunks or tear apart closets when parents attempt to limit gaming, which is what parents are supposed to do–impose limits for their children’s health and safety. Spouses and parents describe addicts not eating or sleeping and becoming assaultive with attempts to control gaming. What support is there for parents, for Thomas Crooks’ parents, described as both licensed counselors, who were so worried about their son that July day that they called the police to find him and check on him?
Many governors recently called for cell phone bans in public schools after Jonathan Haidt published his book, The Anxious Generation, discussing research on the emotional, social, and mental health damage cell phone and technology abuse causes young people.
Employment has improved post-pandemic for most groups, and yet males aged 16 to 24 years old still show a 23.6% unemployment rate, as compared with 11.8% pre-pandemic. These figures show those who seek government unemployment benefits. Actual numbers of young males unemployed may be much higher. Sadly, Crooks was employed, had completed a community college degree, had been accepted into at least two four-year schools, and planned to attend one in the fall. Yet he still decided to climb on a rooftop at a political rally with a rangefinder and a rifle, shoot into a crowd, and aim and fire at the head of a political candidate.
If I was this young man’s mother, I would ask, what in the world do you think you are doing climbing on a rooftop with a rifle, aiming at a political candidate? Don’t you realize you could be hurt or killed? His parents were worried about him and called the police to check on him the Saturday he died.
The media negatively portrayed Crooks as belonging to a gun club, where he practiced target shooting with his father’s gun. I didn’t grow up with guns in the house. But I imagine someone like my brother-in-law who does belong to a gun club in rural Illinois, if he had any inkling of this young man’s foolish and desperate behavior, would have asked Crooks what in the world he was going to do, would have told him to act like he had some sense.
Gun club members, who know how to use guns safely, would be glad to take Crooks out hunting or fishing, and may have taught him how to build or repair houses or barns, how to grow food, to raise and process animals for food. Any one of the members of the audience, perhaps many gun owners, at the Butler Farm Complex, may have provided good counsel, perhaps mentorship, to Crooks had they had the chance to steer him away from his deadly path.
But Crooks didn’t care for his own or anyone else’s life or safety by this time. Searches of his computer revealed no ideology on his laptop, investigators have said. None of Crooks’ acquaintances interviewed said he discussed politics. Did Crooks imagine he was “defending democracy” if he succeeded in killing Trump? That potent abstraction that tens of thousands of mostly young men are sent to do in the US foreign wars, many of which are revealed to be based on lies, folly, and profits. How did lockdowns, bullying, and despair contribute to Crooks’ tragedy and to the death of the retired fire chief and the injuries to others? Was Crooks in a game? The last several years of increasingly cruel, vicious political rhetoric provided another potent context for Crooks’ suicidal violence.
“It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,” President Joe Biden said days before Crooks’ assassination attempt. Sadly, I saw an acquaintance on social media post a comment after the shooting that he wished the shooter’s aim was better.
Crooks asked for that Saturday off from his job in a nursing home kitchen. His actions were planned like a suicide. Our time to help him, to prevent this violence was months, perhaps years ago.
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Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/