I just don’t understand why you’re so fired up and bothering to argue about it then? Seems super trivial if you thought it neither adds nor takes away. Your only point in this argument is that the article could have left out some detail, for what, to be a little bit shorter??
I do get your overalll point, and if it was a random mass shooting, I’d agree that we don’t need every little detail about the shooter’s life story. There is some nuance to the fact that this was the attempted assassination of a former president, so it is going to be one of the biggest news stories in the US, and they’re going to report all kinds of details about his life.
But the detail that he bought a ladder that morning is, in my opinion, relevant whether he ultimately brought it with him or not, and not a random detail. His activities leading up to the attempted assassination are relevant to understanding his thinking and mindset. It sheds light into how much prior planning or thought went into it.