I’m steering clear of news stories exploring the many conspiracy theories swirling around last week’s attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump.
At this point, all we know about what happened in Butler, Pa., 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 unfathomable to most of us, but that apparently crosses the minds of young American men steeped in gun culture with alarming regularity.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, climbed onto the roof of a building within rifle range of the rally stage, crawled into position and opened fire, killing a spectator and wounding Trump and two others before he was killed by sharpshooters.
Does it matter that Crooks was a registered Republican? Or that he once donated to a liberal-leaning get-out-the vote group? I would suggest that none of that is particularly important and that political partisans on all sides should bear this awful truth in mind: We are a nation ravaged by gun violence because we make little effort to limit the availability of weapons of war.
Don’t let the pageantry of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this past week lull you into thinking that Trump should be restored to the White House. Nothing about his brush with death changes anything about the deeply antidemocratic future he and the Heritage Foundation envision for this country.
On Monday, the convention’s opening day, Trump anointed a mini-me, Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance, as his running mate. Before Vance had his come-to-orange-Jesus moment and submitted to the former president, he called Trump “America’s Hitler.”
Vance ably demonstrated his partisan credentials when he wrote on X that the shooting was Democrats’ fault and “not just some isolated incident.”
Well, he’s half right.
Last week’s shooting was far from an isolated incident. And as long as politicians refuse to heed the will of the American people — most of whom support stricter gun laws — we are never going to be free of the bloody rampages that regularly convulse families, schools, communities and campaigns.
“We can’t allow this violence to become normalized,” President Joe Biden said from the Oval Office. “The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. We all have a responsibility to do that.”
I appreciate Biden’s sentiment, but I think he’s off base. This sort of violence has absolutely become normal in America.
As historians Matthew Dallek and Robert Dallek wrote in the New York Times on Monday, the attack on Trump “is one on a list of fairly common attempts on presidents’ lives.” 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 assassination attempts on government heads, the Dalleks wrote, America leads the pack. It should go without saying that we are first in gun violence among those countries, as well.
On the day of the attempted assassination of Trump, at least 59 shootings took place in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. They killed 34 people, including Trump supporter Corey Comperatore. The bloodiest such incident was at a nightclub in Birmingham, Ala., where four people died and at least 10 were injured in a drive-by shooting. You probably didn’t even hear about it.
Given the security surrounding presidents, former presidents and presidential candidates, the most shocking aspect of the attempt on Trump’s life is that his would-be assassin was able to get within shooting range of him in the first place. This is the worst security failure of its kind since John Hinckley Jr. got close enough to shoot President Ronald Reagan at close range on a Washington sidewalk in 1981.
In a 2022 survey, the California Firearm Violence Research Center at UC Davis found that Republicans, “and MAGA-supporting Republicans in particular,” were much more likely than others to endorse political violence. This can’t come as a surprise after Jan. 6, 2021.
“There is growing concern that this year’s elections could lead to — or even be decided by — political violence,” the center’s founder, Garen Wintemute, wrote in a prescient essay in the Hill last month.
I hope he was wrong, but I fear he was right.
Robin Abcarian is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
