I will stay away from news stories exploring the many conspiracy theories revolving around Saturday's attempt to assassinate former President Trump.
At this point, all we know about what happened last weekend in Butler, Pennsylvania, is that a young, socially awkward man with shooting experience and access to a high-powered assault weapon decided to do something that would be unimaginable to most of us, but apparently crosses the minds of young Americans immersed in gun culture with alarming regularity.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, climbed onto the unsecured roof of a building within rifle range of the rally stage, crawled to his position and opened fire, killing one spectator and wounding Trump and two others before being killed by shooters.
Does it matter that Crooks was a registered Republican?
Does it matter that he once donated to a liberal-leaning group that seeks to mobilize people to vote?
I would argue that none of that is particularly important and that political supporters of all parties should keep in mind this terrible truth: we are a nation devastated by gun violence because we make little effort to limit the availability of weapons of war.
Don’t let the spectacle and intense emotion of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week make you think that Trump should be reinstated in the White House. Nothing about his brush with death changes anything about the deeply undemocratic future that he and the Heritage Foundation envision for this country.
On Monday, the opening day of the convention, Trump named a mini-me, Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance, as his running mate. Before Vance had his moment in the sun and deferred to the former president, he called Trump “America’s Hitler.”
Can you imagine Vice President Vance following in the footsteps of Vice President Mike Pence and refusing an order to overturn the will of the voters?
Vance deftly demonstrated his partisan credentials when he wrote in X that the shooting was the fault of Democrats and “not just an isolated incident.”
Well, he's half right.
Saturday's shooting was not an isolated incident, and as long as politicians refuse to heed the will of the American people (who overwhelmingly support stricter gun laws), we will never be free of the bloody riots that regularly convulse families, schools, communities and campaigns.
“We cannot allow this violence to become normalized,” President Biden said from the Oval Office on Sunday. “The political rhetoric in this country has become very heated. It’s time to calm it down. We all have a responsibility to do so.” (Hmm, does that include Mark Robinson, the unhinged Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina who said at a church last month that “there are people who need to be killed”?)
I appreciate Biden's sentiment, but I think he is wrong. This kind of violence has become absolutely normal in the United States.
As historians Matthew Dallek and Robert Dallek wrote in the New York Times on Monday, the attack on Trump “is one in a list of fairly common attempts on the lives of presidents.” Between 1963 and 1981, gunmen opened fire on “three presidents, two presidential candidates and two national civil rights leaders.” Of all the world’s democracies, when it comes to attempted assassinations of heads of government, the Dalleks wrote, the United States tops the list. Needless to say, we also rank first in gun violence among those countries.
On the day of the attempted assassination of Trump, there were at least 59 shootings in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. They killed 34 people, including Trump supporter Corey Comperatore, and injured 80, including Trump. The deadliest such incident occurred at a nightclub in Birmingham, Alabama, where four people were killed and at least 10 injured in a drive-by shooting. You probably didn't even hear about it.
Given the extraordinary security surrounding presidents, former presidents, and presidential candidates, the most shocking aspect of the attempted assassination of Trump is that his would-be assassin was able to get within shooting range of him in the first place. It is the worst security lapse of its kind since John Hinckley Jr. got close enough to shoot President Reagan at point-blank range on a Washington sidewalk in 1981.
In a 2022 survey, the California Gun Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis, found that Republicans, “and MAGA-supporting Republicans in particular,” were far more likely than others to support political violence. This may not be surprising after what we experienced on January 6, 2021.
“There is growing concern that this year’s election could lead to, or even be decided by, political violence,” the center’s founder, Garen Wintemute, wrote in a prescient essay published in The Hill last month.
I wish I was wrong, but I'm afraid I was right.
