…the attempted assassination of a sitting member of Congress is inherently political, and politics is the process by which democracies negotiate the solutions to public problems. Conservatives know this. If the shooter had been a member of a Mexican drug cartel as some conservatives assumed, they would be calling for stricter immigration laws and blaming the White House for lax enforcement. If the shooter had been named “Mohammed,” no amount of evidence of mental illness would have persuaded conservatives that Islam wasn’t the culprit, and that the administration’s terrorism policies had failed. Instead, the shooter appears to have lurked on the extremist fringe of right-wing politics, much like Byron Williams and James von Brunn, and so conservatives are calling for a calm and reasoned assessment of the facts. The guilt is individual, rather than collective.