How accurate were my guesses about the shooter? You tell me.

Immediately after news broke about the possible suspect behind the Highland Park shooting, I made a few guesses about him. Let’s see how I’m doing.

My earlier guesses are in regular text. The latest news is italics.

1. Considering that this guy’s social media was dripping with weirdness and violence, you would think that Illinois’s Red Flag laws would have stopped him…but they didn’t. This is yet another case in which Red Flags were useless, although their uselessness won’t stop them from being abused.

The guy (who I will not name) was known to the police. In 2019, he was threatening to kill everyone, leading the police to confiscate 16 knives, a dagger, and a sword, yet he was not put through a red flag hearing.

2. I wonder if the guy’s career as a sort-of successful rapper was how he got a pass on his craziness. Gangsta rap is now and has been for decades dripping with weirdness and violence. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? That is, who can tell if people are rapping those awful things for effect or if they’re genuinely crazy?

This remains a matter of opinion.

3. I don’t think it was a coincidence that this shooting was in a predominantly Jewish community.

No news on this.

4. My first thought when I saw a picture of the alleged shooter was “Uses a lot of marijuana and has been on prescription psychotropic drugs.” That seems to be a consistent feature of these young, skinny, white mass shooters.

He was an isolated stoner:

Also, interestingly, Tucker had the same thought I did about the guy using prescription psychotropic drugs (a good guess considering how many of these disaffected, murderous young men are on such drugs):

5. The shooter seems to come from an intact family, with a father who was there for his youth. That’s very unexpected, so I wonder if there’s more to the man’s relationship with the father than meets the eye.

The Daily Mail has some info about his home life:

Highland Park shooter Bobby Crimo and his younger brother were often left behind at their afterschool program because their ‘flighty’ mom forgot to pick them up or their dad was at work, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Crimo, 21, attended Lincoln Elementary School with his younger brother Sam. Between 2008 and 2014, they attended the LEAP afterschool program.

Jeremy Cahnmann, 47, was a sports coach in the program. He told DailyMail.com how out of hundreds of kids he taught over the years, the Crimo brothers stood out because their parents often left them behind.

He said it ‘of course’ did not explain why he committed such violence yesterday, but that the constant occurrences likely made him feel neglected as a child.

It’s unclear when the shooter’s parents separated but they no longer live together; Crimo’s father, Bob, is a local deli owner and one-time mayoral candidate.

His mother Denise is an ‘alternative healer’.

6. These shootings catch headlines and are terrible. On the other hand, the illegal fentanyl flooding the border and killing over 100,000 Americans per year is ignored. So we get people demanding an end to the Second Amendment, which is used defensively between 500,000 and 2.5 million times per year, based on a statistically small number of deaths, but we never hear from the same people a demand to close the border and crack down on drug smugglers and dealers, although their product confers no benefit on anyone and produces huge numbers of deaths, along with destroyed lives.

No news on this obviously. I don’t expect the newspaper to discuss this issue.

Image by Wirestock (edited) on Freepik. Bullet hole from freeiconspng.