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Bullying: The Making of Murderers

Ella Valentine
5 min readAug 23, 2024

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Murderers are born and made. If we have the opportunity to prevent the latter, what are we doing about it? The recent attempt to assassinate Donald Trump raised a myriad of questions, some of which regarding the past of his bullied shooter. The importance of mental health measurements has never been higher — what are we waiting for?

Donald Trump’s recent assassination attempt has raised a pool of questions: has he become a surprise hero, was the assassination staged, what does it mean for the presidential race, are voters swaying, and why was he shot?

Image source: BBC

The FBI released the identity of the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a Pennsylvania local man of just 20 who was bullied at school. The fact that he was bullied opened another question but it was the wrong question. As soon as footage of him being bullied was shared on social media, people began commenting on how this doesn’t justify what he did. No, it doesn’t but it is still an event we shouldn’t dismiss.

It’s not the first time we have witnessed or heard of an assassination attempt, a shooter or a murderer who had previously undergone bullying, and the right questions we should be asking are: could some of those murders or shootings have been prevented had this individual gotten help on time? What can we do to prevent bullying at schools? How can we improve our mental health system…

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