Political assassinations in America are usually committed by nutjobs. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communism-sympathizing loser. James Earl Ray was a career criminal who copped a guilty plea to avoid the death penalty and then falsely maintained his innocence until the day he died in prison.

This time feels different. This murderer looked normal. He earned college credits while in high school. He was a straight-A student. He had no criminal record.

He lived at home with his parents, two registered Republicans active in their Mormon church in conservative Utah. The family all talked ‘round the dinner table, as families used to.

One of those family dinner table talks early this week was about Charlie Kirk, who was due to visit the area on Thursday.

You know the rest of the story. As Charlie was talking in his trademark sort of way – not ranting, not raving, not cursing, but simply sitting and talking in a normal conversational way – the murderer shot him in the neck from a rooftop with a high-powered rifle. Charlie bled to death in seconds.

After video of the murder scene circulated, the murderer’s father turned him in with the help of a family friend who was retired from law enforcement.

Apart from the murder (but how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?) the whole scene looks like a Norman Rockwell painting – a perfect glimpse of Americana.

Over a half a century ago, philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She was struck by the pedestrian personality of Eichmann in his trial and before his hanging in Jerusalem. He was not evil in the obvious ways. He had no horns, no cape, no devilish laugh, no foaming at the mouth, no apparent Hitlerisms.

Rather, Eichmann was a not-very-bright technocrat who’d dropped out of high school. He believed he was not just following orders (he was) but that he was following the law. He exhibited no hatred for the Jews, apart from his role in killing six million of them.

If Adolf Eichmann had been born into modern America, he might have become a mid-level manager in the EPA, the IRS or the Social Security Administration. He lacked both the credentials and ideology to be in the White House of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and he certainly lacked the passion.

Which brings me back to Charlie Kirk’s murderer. He was a devotee of the vapid echo chambers of online “discussion” but he exhibited little nuttiness or passion, until Thursday anyway.

Yes, he was a straight-A student, but in today’s schools that barely puts a kid in the top half of the class. Yes, he earned college credits while in high school, but then dropped out of a fourth-rate college. Yes, he participated in discussions at the family dinner table, but why was he living at home and eating his mother’s cooking at age 22?

The kid was a casual underachiever just going through the motions of an unlived life. He was the picture of banality.

The banal evil of Adolph Eichmann was six million times worse than the banal evil of Charlie Kirk’s murderer, but here’s what gives me pause: There are at least six million of these kids out there.