Over those next few days after the shooting, I think everyone was desperate to know who the killer was, why they did it. I had so many private conversations with people in which they would say to me something like, I just hope he’s not — or she’s not, but I think people assumed it was a man — X, right, where X was their politics. Just let them be illegible, not some kind of legible political actor. You were up there getting that information as it came in, I guess I’ve had a question about our whole debate over politics and motive. What does knowing a lone gunman’s motive tell us and not tell us. What meaning does it permit us to make. Because I think we’re looking for it as a way of making meaning and what doesn’t it. Yeah, I said in that initial press conference, that — or one of them — that I had hoped it wasn’t a Utahan, that somebody had driven from another state or from another country. But by the way, just as an aside, in real time, watching some people of a different political ideology take that and accuse me of racism, that I wanted it to be an illegal immigrant or something, it’s just, seeing that happen is just crazy to me. But there is no generosity. We see that and it’s happened to me on both sides of the political spectrum. I believe firmly, and what I’ve tried to do is just to share what the facts are, because too often we have a tendency to hide those things. And when we do that, then we lose trust. And we’ve lost so much trust in our institutions, so much trust in our elected leaders. If this had been, if there was clear evidence right up front that this guy had a MAGA hat and had been MAGA, I would have said that too. So I think it’s important that we understand the facts of every single one of these cases, whatever it is. There are examples, and you’ve pointed out examples, and I pointed out examples of people all across the political spectrum who have committed these atrocities. And I think it’s only helpful in that we do need to try to figure out if there is something we can do societally to prevent these things from happening. And the only way to do that is to find out why they happened. And I think those are worthy discussions. But if we’re only trying to find out the motive of the person or the political ideology of the person so that we can feel better about ourselves or to hate a broad group of people who have no intention or don’t support this type of behavior in any way, then that’s not healthy.
