Well, of course, the shooter was a loner

• “The best things in life happen to you when you’re alone.” — artist Agnes Martin.
• “One can never be alone enough to write. To see better.” — writer Susan Sontag.
• “You are always being lured away by foolish distractions. Seek solitude.” — artist Eugène Delacroix.

A few weeks ago, after the FBI identified the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, I began counting the hours before a reporter found someone to describe the assailant as a loner. I didn’t have long to wait. Within a day, CNN published online: “Jason Kohler, 21, who went to the same high school, told CNN that Crooks was bullied by other students and seemed to be a loner.”

Of course. Mass shooters and would-be assassins under the age of 25 are so often described as loners, I’ve come to believe that in the aftermath of, say, a school shooting, editors in newsrooms across the land dispatch reporters: “Get out there, Calhoun, we need a loner-quote, pronto.” And Calhoun always finds some dope to provide one.

Read the coverage of the Trump shooting over the four or five days after the incident and you will note that almost every description of the mysterious Thomas Crooks from people who knew him was complimentary. They praised his intelligence and aptitude and gentleness and kindness, and everyone sounded genuinely shocked by what happened. But I knew if anyone described the young man as solitary, that detail would find its way from the reporter’s notebook to the top of the story and probably the subhead. Fifty people could attest to Crooks’ good grades and gentle nature, but if one called him a loner, there you go. That quote, however atypical of everything else everyone said, would be featured and the idea would persist. Weeks after the Trump shooting, Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, wrote, “Nor did Biden and Trump have equally bad weeks. Biden is facing a revolt in his own party and is now recovering from COVID. Trump was nearly killed by a young loner.” Because the important thing to know about any shooter is the paucity of his social life.

Being a loner is no more determinative than the shooter’s having small ears or a lisp or yellow socks, but that does not seem to occur to anyone. He spent much of his time by himself and elected not to sign up for French Club and student government and the track team? Well, we should have known what he was capable of. Why wasn’t anyone watching him?

In 2003 the writer Anneli Rufus published the smart, witty, angry book Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto. In the introduction, she wrote:

The mob thinks we are maladjusted. Of course, we are adjusted just fine, not to their frequency. They take it personally.

They take offense. Feel hurt. Get angry. They do not blame owls for coming out at night, yet they blame us for being as we are. Because it involves them, or at least they believe it does, they assemble the traps and call us names.

As part of her polemic, Rufus examined statements from that dubious group of “experts” known as police profilers:

As profilers would have it, loners are up to a lot of other mayhem as well. In fact, if [the profilers] are to be believed, we are far too busy hunting and hurting others and burning down their houses to have any time left to ourselves.

She caustically quotes from the internet:

On a Christian website, a list of “Typical Satanism-related Crimes” includes “Murder (fairly rare, and essentially by loners).” Good to know.

Author—there’s a loaded term, most authors are loners, you know—Susan Cain has turned introversion into a lucrative business. In the introduction to her bestselling Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, she writes:

Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are.

WebMD, under “Mental Health/Reference,” has a handy article titled “Signs of a Loner.” It’s not bylined—“Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors”—but whoever wrote it wraps things up with a bit of helpful condescension, subtitled “Dealing with a Loner”:

When dealing with a loner, make sure to give them plenty of space to think and breathe. Don’t rush them to make a decision, and don’t pressure them to move too quickly.

Patience and understanding are appropriate approaches when dealing with loners. Allow them to recharge and become comfortable with where they are before trying to engage. By providing them the space they need, they will more likely open up and let you into their solitary world.

So, we have to be “dealt with.” Looking past the faulty grammar of that last sentence, I can’t decide if these feel like instructions for what to do if I come across an anonymous 4-year-old on the front lawn or a bear in the back country. No sudden moves—you don’t want to set a loner off.

Do I sound like I’m taking this personally? My entire life, I have been solitary. As soon as I learned to read at age 7, I started closing the door to my bedroom so I could read undisturbed. By the time I was out of grade school, I would do this for hours. After my mother died, my father collected every picture he had of her, and of me. He projected them for me once and in photo after photo, no matter what the occasion—backyard BBQ, family gathering, holiday celebration—I can be found slightly apart from the crowd and concentrating on a book. I wasn’t disaffected; I liked everyone in the room and loved my parents. I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts and my reading without seeming rude, so instead of slipping away to my room I slipped away to a corner and my own mind.

My parents tolerated my solitary nature, their tolerance a gift far larger than they could ever imagine. For a time, my mother fretted that I didn’t have enough friends and pestered me to invite somebody to the house, to play after school. In the hope that she’d leave me alone, I finally relented. Some kid came over and we played for a while and that was fine and then I came out of my room and said to my mom, “Okay, I’m done. How do I get him to go home?” Her face betrayed puzzlement and exasperation, but she never again bothered me about friends, and I loved her for it.

Early on, I sensed my personality’s capacity to make people uncomfortable. One day in the 6th grade I must have been away in my own thoughts because the teacher asked me what was on my mind, not kindly but with suspicion. I told her it was none of her business. She didn’t appreciate my tone, and I don’t blame her, I could be a smartass, but already at age 12 I resented the idea that anyone was entitled to quiz me on why I was quietly in my own world.

In a TED Talk, Susan Cain told a story I could relate to, about going off to her first summer camp:

Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.

As a high school kid, whenever I could I walked back and forth to school, though it was a couple of miles from my house. I loved the solitude. I loved that for 45 minutes down and 45 minutes back, it was just me. One of my first bosses after college, at a company I hated, criticized me for not eating my lunch each day with the other guys. Instead, I would go to a nearby park and eat alone. I would not be promoted, he said, “because you’re not a regular guy.” I found another job.

People routinely mistake solitary for socially isolated. My mother’s concern notwithstanding, I had all the friends I wanted. Not long ago I was reunited, after more than 50 years, with a classmate from my hometown. At one point she said, “What I remember about you is that you seemed to know everybody.” She added that I crossed the usual cliquish lines of high school society: the brainiac nerds accepted me, the band and drama kids accepted me, the jocks accepted me. I had buddies, I had a pretty girlfriend, I do not remember ever feeling lonely. But I also needed to be by myself for a good part of any day. So I walked home alone.

Many years ago I was strolling through a writer’s conference with a friend and happened to run into three professional colleagues, one after another, all of them female. I liked them all and I hadn’t seen any of them for years. After the last surprise encounter, my friend observed, with a bit of affectionate snark, “For a loner you sure hug a lot of women.”

The equation loner=isolated=disturbed=suspect is widespread in our society and our media, and it is pernicious. Solitude is desirable and essential for many of us, especially artists, and it’s usually voluntary. Social isolation is imposed and it hurts. No one loads a gun because he enjoys being by himself. But people who are shunned, bullied, made to feel outcast? Most of them just live with the injustice, but some of them pick up an AR-15.

Part of what irritates me about loner-quotes in the news coverage after a shooting is that the journalistic habit is so lazy and dumb. A would-be assassin’s motives are important. A solitary personality is not a motive. Why this distinction is lost on so many in the press baffles and exasperates me. Actually, the whole witless ritual of tracking down people who knew the shooter exasperates me. Can you recall a single one of those interviews that ever yielded something meaningful? I can’t. We struggle to know truly the people we love and live with. Why would anyone think we’d have psychological insight into someone who, five years ago, sat three desks over in civics class? Why can’t we be smarter? Why can’t we be more thoughtful?

Once, in a shop window in Lower Manhattan, I spotted a black t-shirt on display. In white Helvetica lettering, all caps, the shirt said, “DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING PEOPLE PERSON?” I would never be so vulgar as to wear it in public. But oh man, I wanted one.