Chrkeller said: Can't bad people simply be bad people? Why does a person need to be put into a political bucket? Bad people exist across all demographics. |
Absolutely bad people exist everywhere. The point of these conversations isn't "Republicans are violent monsters, look at this one random guy for proof".
That's not how science or logic work. It's anecdotal/ it's cherry picking/etc.
The point of these conversations is that "sometimes people are bad" by itself doesn't give us much to work with. We have to ask "why are people sometimes bad?" Is it because they were motivated by religious propaganda or political propaganda or were they motivated by their mental state (which again might bring us to is their mental state motivated by economics/religion/etc)?
Understanding motivations gives us something to work with. Where did he get these ideas, why did he want to do it, what exactly was he hoping to accomplish? Those are productive questions.
Figuring out that someone was being exposed to anti-American propaganda or anti-Democratic propaganda or anti-conservative propaganda gives us something to work with.
That gets us to the next part where we can figure out how to handle dangerous propaganda, of any kind.
Or figuring out anything else that might have motivated this event brings us to something else that might be solvable.