Highland Park shooter 'part of a new wave of terror' that advanced 'well past Donald Trump': extremism expert
The alleged gunman in the Highland Park massacre was photographed at Donald Trump rallies, but an expert on online extremism said he's part of a "new wave of terror" that doesn't appear to have a specific political motivation.
Robert "Bobby" Crimo III was taken into custody hours after the shooting that killed six people and wounded 38 others at an Illinois parade on the Fourth of July, and NBC News correspondent Ben Collins told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" what he had learned about the person of interest in the massacre.
"I will say that -- man, there's no other way to put this -- the one thing that combines all these things is ready access to weapons, and this guy had ready access to weapons," Collins said. "That's just the one thing. He had ready access to a machine that could kill a bunch of people in a short period of time. You're not going to be able to stop this on a rhetorical level."
"This guy, he posted on Spotify, on Discord, on a bunch of websites that you and I would never hear of," Collins continued. "He posted on Twitter, on YouTube, Instagram, posted everywhere he could post. Even if there was a consortium of people who worked at the private companies monitoring this stuff, you couldn't get them all. There's no way to get them all necessarily. Also, I want to say, like, you can't drill this down to one specific traditional political subculture. I know a lot of people want to point out he was a Donald Trump fan, there were pictures of him draped in a Trump flag outside of a Donald Trump motorcade."
RELATED: Gen. Russel Honoré: Trump's coup attempt 'put us in the banana republic club'
"This is part of a much larger, deeper subculture that Donald Trump is in the past of -- like, this guy grew up as a child and Donald Trump was the president, he's trying to advance the acceleration well past Donald Trump," Collins added. "He is part of a new wave of terror, and that's something we have to get our brains around right now. This is not tied to one guy. This is tied to a much larger cell of people who think they're lone wolves who are really acting in concert, to express their disaffection with the world by murdering a bunch of people. We have to stop that. I don't know how else to stop that."
Collins said limiting access to high-powered firearms must be part of that conversation, because the online networks that motivate mass shooters are simply too large.
"The one thing you can stop at the very end is the gun part, but we have to at least, you know, try to start to learn how people are getting to this point," he said. "Otherwise, we're going to come here every two weeks, guys, like every two weeks, we're going to be on this show talking about what's going to happen and how we can't stop this thing. We have to wrap our brains around this very new reality, where there are a bunch of different subcultures that are extremely violent."
Watch the video below or at this link.
Leave a Comment
Related Post