Subject: Re: Headline:Searching for a motive
Replying to my own post:

while it seems like an assassination attempt would always be politically motivated, it still sometimes happens that the target's politics aren't really a factor.

Often it's obviously and entirely because of the target's politics - for example, Booth killed Lincoln because he thought Lincoln was a tyrant. But sometimes it's not - Hinckley shot Reagan just because doing so would bring him fame/notoriety, not because of Reagan's politics. Sometimes it's....complicated, like with Squeaky Fromme - a disturbed person who apparently was a zealot about trees (which is a policy), but didn't have any especial complaint about Ford's policies towards trees. He just happened to be the President.

So we're more than two weeks out, and the FBI (and others) still haven't found any indication that the shooter had any strongly held political beliefs. They're releasing some information because they're under enormous pressure from Congress to release information (with some justification) - so if there was anything that would clearly point to what we would regard as a conventional motive for an assassination, we probably would have heard it by now.

While he certainly had a "motive" in the most literal sense - some impulse caused him to do these things - it's starting to look like he didn't have the type of motive that ordinary folks would expect for an assassination attempt.