The flaw in that so-called "logic" is obvious, because if left-wing thinking really did breed instability, we'd be drowning in mass shooters and assassins by now, but we're not.

What's far more plausible is that this kid was raised in a conservative Christian household, marinated in gun culture, and taught from the outset that if reason fails, there's always plan B, the Second Amendment.

When he was finally exposed to other people at school, living and studying alongside them, he saw firsthand that the narrow, bigoted rhetoric he'd been indoctrinated with wasn't reality. He befriended the very groups Kirk spent his career attacking, women, black people, LGBTQ people, and that dissonance was staring him in the face.

But when the weight of that clash became too much, what did he fall back on? Not open-mindedness, not reason, but the old familiar tools of his upbringing, the gun and the grievance. He leaned into the Second Amendment and took matters into his own hands.

And even if the DOJ is busily sanitising reports to downplay the reality that right-wing extremists have been the most prolific source of political violence in the US for over a decade, eclipsing even Islamist terrorists, the fact remains, this is the culture that raised him, and this is the culture he enacted.

If anything, the tragedy underscores just how dangerous a conservative Christian upbringing can be. It doesn't prepare people to handle opposing ideas or to engage with rational alternatives to MAGA dogma. Instead, it leaves them conditioned to retreat into extremism, and to reach for a firearm when their worldview collapses.

Tylers mother  is a witness for the prosecution under oath she says her son moved to the left.