FALSE SPRING: Who committed yesterday's murder?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2025

Are we nearing the end of a spring? This morning, we flashed on the passage from Hemingway's memoir, A Moveable Feast—his rumination about life in Paris in the face of that city's "false spring."

We'll reproduce a bit of that passage at the end of this piece. We'll start with the somewhat peculiar thing John Miller said last night.

Currently, Miller's a major figure at CNN. To his credit, there's nothing flashy about the guy, and he has an impressive resume:

John Miller (police official)

John Miller (born July 29, 1958) is an American journalist and police official. From 1983 to 1994, he was a local journalist in New York City, before serving as the NYPD's chief spokesman from 1994 to 1995.

In 1995, Miller joined ABC News, and secured an interview with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. In 2003, he returned back to law enforcement as a senior official in the LAPD and in 2005 as Assistant Director for Public Affairs at the FBI. Miller was named a senior correspondent for CBS News in 2011.

In 2013, Miller rejoined law enforcement as the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence & Counterterrorism under Commissioner William Bratton. Miller left the NYPD in July 2022 and in September [2022] he was hired as CNN's chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.

Miller isn't inclined to shoot off his mouth. He tends to be appropriately cautious.

That said, he's very experienced in law enforcement, and he's highly connected. That's why we were surprised by what we saw him say last night, which of course turn out to be totally wrong.

Speaking with Kaitlan Collins, Miller offered this during the 9 o'clock hour:

COLLINS (9/10/25): So, is it clear if anyone is in custody right now? Or is the answer still no, based on what we know so far?

MILLER: Based on what we know so far, they have somebody they're interested in, who, according to my sources, when I last spoke to them, was not in custody.

But, in a case like this, you are looking for someone who has detachment and a lack of empathy, who likes to be in control.

The offender characteristics of the—of the assassin, sniper, are something that's been studied very closely, especially by the Secret Service, and it's someone who is methodical and patient, self-reliant.

In other words, Kaitlan, this is the kind of person who would have planned to get in silently, try to be invisible, take this shot, accomplish the mission, take the gun with them, and leave little evidence behind, which is why I think they're having a very difficult time getting started on this. This is someone who was a planner...

"This is someone who was a planner?" Miller almost seemed to be saying—well, here's what he actually said

COLLINS (continuing directly): And John, also, what stood out to me, from what we heard from officials earlier, was they said it was a single shot that was fired. It wasn't multiple shots in Charlie Kirk's direction. They said it was about 200 yards away from where he was sitting under that tent.

What does that tell you about the person's familiarity with firearms?

MILLER: That tells you that the person is not new to shooting, that they understood exactly what type of long rifle to bring, what kind of optics in terms of scopes and sights to have on that, what the windage was that might affect a shot from that distance.

This is someone who knew exactly what they were doing, and is probably known to others, and this may be working to the advantage of law enforcement as someone who has a long history in shooting. This wasn't an amateur.

"This wasn't an amateur," Miller said, having referred to what he's heard from his unnamed sources.

He seemed to be saying that this probably wasn't another 20-year-old man who was deeply depressed and was therefore significantly "mentally ill." 

To us, his assessment sounded highly speculative. But one hour earlier, on Jesse Watters Primetime, another law enforcement specialist had told Watters this, as reported by Newsweek:

Charlie Kirk assassination "had professional hallmarks": Security experts

[...]

Former FBI Agent Stuart Kaplan said the shooter likely put a lot of preparation into the attack, telling Fox News' Jesse Watters: "This assassination, different to the attack [on Trump] back in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a very well planned, very well orchestrated plot that was put in motion days before.

"This individual had a plan of escape to elude detection of being out on a rooftop, and also being able to evade and elude law enforcement," added Kaplan. "This assassination of Charlie Kirk to me is indicative of a professional hit, and I'm not so sure we are quickly going to be able to apprehend this individual without some luck."

Kaplan said it had the feel of "a professional hit." 

On New York City's Fox 5, a different specialist offered a similar speculation. Here's more from the Newsweek report:

Former Republican New York State Senator and Homeland Security adviser Michael Balboni made a similar point, telling Fox News: "It's an incredibly chaotic scene on a college campus. Hundreds and hundreds of people there, right immediately afterward.

He added: "That a rifle sound...was heard, and yet nobody was able to identify an individual, which most likely means that the individual was shooting from concealment and maybe had some way to suppress or to hide the flash of the gun, and again, indicating that this is a sophisticated individual.

"One shot hitting the target from 200 meters away and then escaping without anybody seeing them—those are the hallmarks of a professional." 

It seems to us that those speculations are based on fairly limited evidence. But Miller had offered a similar assessment, and he's a thoroughly sober judge.

Is it possible that the person who committed this murder was a professional assassin? Everything is always possible, though some people—inevitably, Watters among them, on The Five—had seemed to leap to instant conclusions concerning the motive of the person who committed this murder.

It may turn out that the person in question was another disturbed young (or older) man. It may turn out that he was an amateur—that he wasn't a professional at all, that his instant escape was pure luck.

Then again, professional assassins are hired by someone, for that person's purpose, and the possibilities there would be endless. 

Like Watters, we ourselves don't know who might have committed this crime, or why he might have done that.  Unlike Watters, we'd be inclined to wait until we all (may) get to find out.

Meanwhile, no one was a bigger winner in this disaster than the peace-seeking Vladimir Putin. 

He's been staging a long gamble in which the western world's form of democracy won't be able to sustain itself under modern arrangements. Yesterday's murder undermines the ability of this flailing nation to continue a famous experiment:

That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

At Gettysburg, that was Lincoln's prayer. Two years later he himself was shot and killed by an enraged fellow citizen.

Putin isn't an amateur. As of yesterday, he was invading Polish air space, and one of his lackeys was openly threatening Finland's existence.

He won't get tired of all the winning.! That said, yesterday's murder was his latest win as he proceeds with his gamble that our form of government won't be able to survive the information wars which have now emerged from the "democratization of media"—from the new arrangements in which, to borrow from Huey Long, it's "every flyweight a king."

We've been coming undone for a long time now. We started telling you that long ago.

We Blues insist that it's still 1898—pr 1955, or 1619. This angers the Reds you see on Fox & Friends Weekend, and they start chanting Communist Communist Communist Communist and also "lunatic left."

Was our species made for this type of work, or will we return to rule by strongman? We can't answer that question, but we'd say the signs aren't real good.

For the record:

You aren't allowed to shoot and kill someone because you don't like his politics or his way of pursuing his politics. Also, you aren't allowed to shoot and kill someone because somebody paid you to do that.

We don't know who murdered Charlie Kirk, but you aren't allowed to do that. We flashed this morning on Hemingway's passage about life in Paris in the early days, but also about what he called the "false spring:"

With so many trees in the city you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

It was like a young person had died for no reason. 

We don't know who committed yesterday's crime. But given the way we're going now, might our handful of centuries of fitful self-government turn out to have been a false spring?

Later in that striking memoir: Later in that striking memoir, with the stunning reversal in its last few pages:

Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring...