Is Nikolas Cruz A Member Of Antifa And A Registered Democrat

Leave it to lawmakers and pundits to ascribe political motivations to people who may take none.

It didn't take long afterwards the shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school for politicians and pundits to speculate on whether the doubtable was left- or right-leaning.

CNN's Van Jones retweeted an account that suggested well-nigh mass shooters are Republicans. Meanwhile, a state legislator in North Carolina claimed on Facebook that most shooters are "communist Democrats," and a Congresswoman from New York fabricated a similar claim. (Read about her claim here.)

In NC, state Rep. Larry Pittman, a Republican state House member from Cabarrus County, near Charlotte, was reacting to a photo on Facebook that purported to evidence the Parkland shooter wearing a pro-Communism shirt. (It was not the Parkland shooter.)

"Then many of these shooters turn out to exist communist Democrats, that I suspect they are doing these things to push button for gun control then they tin can more hands take over the land," Pittman wrote. The postal service was subsequently deleted and he apologized.

There's a lot we practice know nigh the people who conduct mass shootings. For instance, they're mostly white men. They're usually young. And some have a history of mental illness.

As for their political affiliation? Here'southward what we found.

Mass shooters since Columbine

There is no universal definition for mass shootings.

We looked at 19 shootings that have received significant national media coverage since the Columbine High Schoolhouse shooting in 1999. More than eight people were killed in each of the shootings.

We establish very few cases in which the political amalgamation of the shooter could be verified.

Omar Mateen, the shooter who killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, was registered as a Democrat in 2006. He voted in the Florida primary in 2016, according to reporting from Politico.

A dating profile for Chris Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people at a community college in Oregon in 2015, said he was a Republican, co-ordinate to reporting from CBS News. In that location was no prove of his political affiliation beyond the profile.

A friend of Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Thousand in 2013, said in a CNN interview that the shooter was "more than of a liberal type." At that place were no other reports of his political affiliation.

Politicians were the victims of a couple of recent shooting rampages that weren't on our list of 19 mass shootings.

In 2017, 66-year-old James Thomas Hodgkinson shot and injured six people at a congressional baseball game in Virginia — nearly killing House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Hodgkinson volunteered for the presidential campaign of Democrat Bernie Sanders and apparently targeted the Republican team.

In 2011, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in Tucson at an issue hosted by Rep. Gabby Giffords, an Arizona Democrat. Loughner killed six and injured thirteen others, including Giffords. Authorities reported that he was obsessed with Giffords.

Inaccurate reporting

There was speculation about the political leanings of some of the other shooters.

ABC News falsely reported that James Holmes, who killed 12 people in Colorado in 2012, was a fellow member of the bourgeois Tea Political party. ABC apologized for the error. Breitbart News reported that Holmes may have been a registered Democrat, but also walked dorsum that merits. Holmes' political affiliation was never verified.

Fake news websites claimed Devin Patrick Kelley, who killed 26 people in a Texas church building last year, was linked to anti-fascist groups. PolitiFact debunked that claim.

Websites made the aforementioned claim about Las Vegas shooter Stephen Craig Paddock. We debunked that, likewise. Paddock wasn't registered to vote and his family unit said he didn't have strong political views, according to a study from Fob News.

There were likewise claims that Adam Lanza, who killed 20 people at Sandy Claw Elementary School in 2012, was a Democrat. He was not registered to vote, according to the Washington Post.

Most recently, our friends at Snopes debunked the claim that Nikolas Cruz, who allegedly killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, was a Democrat. A search of Florida's voter database yielded no results for Cruz'south political party affiliation.

There was no reporting on the political leanings of the other 11 shooters.

Is it relevant?

Mass shooters are rarely motivated by a political calendar, experts told united states of america.

Mass shootings are often perpetrated by young men who are socially isolated or accept a mental disease, experience a trauma or disharmonize that sends them reeling emotionally, and accept easy access to guns, said Alan Lipman, professor at George Washington Academy Medical Eye and founder of the Eye for the Study of Violence.

"Their motives are almost always, without exception, nonpolitical. And they don't describe themselves as having a particular political motivation," Lipman said.

Some — like Dylann Roof, who killed 9 people at a church building in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 — might channel their rage at a specific group of people, said James Alan Play a joke on, criminologist at Northeastern University and author of "Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder." But that doesn't hateful they're acting on a Republican or Democratic mission, he said.

"Very few are motivated past any sort of political agenda in terms in parties. They might be anti-gay or anti-black or anti-white. You could debate those are political, I guess," he said.

Fifty-fifty then, those beliefs are frequently born out of personal vendettas — not political propaganda, said Katherine Ramsland, professor of psychology at DeSales University.

"Await at Stephen Paddock. Nosotros don't know his motive," Ramsland said in an email, referring to the Las Vegas shooter. "Devin Kelly — his political affiliation is secondary to his family disputes and need for payback. I just think it's overly simplistic to align a mass shooter's influence with a political ideology unless it'southward clear from the shooter that this was his (or her) driving issue."

Other experts reacted similarly to the assertion that shooters tend to have common political beliefs.

"Almost of the school shooters are children who wouldn't know a conservative from a communist," said Jack Levin, Northeastern professor and co-managing director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict. "The thought of associating politics with these mass murders is absurd. It has absolutely nothing to do with it."

Lipman agreed: "There is absolutely no show to show that mass killings are motivated past political ideologies of any type. All of the mass killings nosotros've seen have been motivated by a lethal combination of a small subgroup of mental illnesses, and easy accessibility to weapons of mass killing during the tiptop symptomatology of those illnesses."

Our ruling

Pittman said many perpetrators of mass shootings turn out to be communist Democrats. Nosotros establish no testify to support that argument and experts say simply a small fraction of mass shooters were motivated past a political agenda. We rate this Pants on Fire.