Washington Examiner senior columnist Salena Zito blamed violent actors’ “mental break” for recent attacks against politicians.
Four days have passed since Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were fatally shot. It’s been over two months since Gov. Josh Shapiro’s (D-PA) Mansion in Harrisburg suffered fire damage and broken windows when an arsonist set fire to the residence in the middle of the night. Zito dismissed politics as motive enough for these separate suspects while on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom on Tuesday.
“A lot of them use politics as their reason for doing things. But these are people that have become unhinged from reality. that had a mental break. They use politics — and the other guy used religion as well — as a reason for doing what they do,” Zito said of the suspects in both cases. “But ultimately what they do has nothing actually to do with how people really feel about politics in the country, right? You don’t see people having conversations that escalate to this point.”
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This was similar to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s analysis from Monday, where she suggested perpetrators like Vance Boelter, the suspect who shot Hortman, and David DePape, the convict who bludgeoned Rep Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, were “imbalanced” before they decided to act.
According to Klobuchar, there were about 1,700 threats against members of Congress in 2016. Over the last year, there were over 9,000 threats.