Roughly 18-20% of leftists and about 6-7% of conservatives think violence is acceptable for political gain. I wonder where this person lies on the spectrum.
There's a slippery slope that starts with socially accepted fatalism and the rest follows naturally
When it becomes mainstream to espouse that political issues are life and death, existential stakes, rather than differences of opinion and best practices that can be mutually resolved for the common good- the groundwork for radicalization has already been laid.
Maybe only 20% of leftists- I'd guess even less- would actually think violence is acceptable for political gain. But I'd guess a supermajority believe
their issues are absolutist, the end of the world, genocidal, nuclear, apocalyptic, you name it.
From climate change to ukraine to wealth inequality to AI to genetic engineering to student loans to transgenderism to epstein conspiracies so on so forth every issue, its "We must put in place
my policy or we're all going to die".
How many did the gunman invoke in his manifesto and social media posts?
Civil society has to be vigilantly reinforced, its not enough to just prune the militants and radicals once they've already taken up arms. Their very ideologies need to be crushed, ostracized from polite society like we used to do with Nazis, ya know, before we started shipping them heavy weapons in Ukraine