Donald Trump Shooting: Political Violence is Actually Very American

As many as four American presidents — Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy — have been assassinated in office.

On Saturday, responding to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, President Joe Biden declared in ringing tones, ”There is no place in America for this kind of violence, it’s sick.”

He went on to lament that “the idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.”

In a similar manner, James Comer, a Republican who is the chairman of the House of Representatives House Oversight Committee, said that he would soon have hearings on the incident declaring that “political violence in all forms is un-American and unacceptable.”

The sad fact that both Biden and Comer don’t seem to acknowledge is that violence and political violence are actually very American, part of its intrinsic culture that is a product of its history, and encouraged to no end now by its lax gun laws.

There is only one thing a gun does — it fires bullets that can kill or injure. Yet guns are deeply engrained in America's society and political culture and are sanctioned by its courts.

Mass Shootings and Gun Violence in US Politics

Gun possession is guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the US Constitution as a result of which, according to a Pew poll, 32 percent of adults own a gun. Breaking these figures by race, the poll noted that 38 percent of gun owners were white, 24 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and only 10 percent Asian.

72 percent claimed that it is for self-protection, while 32 percent said they possess guns for hunting. But the poll is quite even (49 percent each) on the percentage of people who say that giving too many people access to guns reduced their safety versus those who said that it increased their safety (by allowing law-abiding people to protect themselves).

Guns used in “mass shootings” are an American “cultural” phenomenon. There are different definitions of what exactly a “mass shooting” is — some institutions like the Gun Violence Archive define it as an event in which four or more persons are shot in one incident in one locality, others like a Stanford University project put the bar at three or more persons, and then, some lists include the perpetrator, while others exclude them.

A Wikipedia compilation from some of these sources put the number of mass shootings in the US at 37 in July alone, including the Trump shooting where two people were killed and three injured. In 2023, there were 604 mass shootings, resulting in 746 people dead and 2,442 injured including the shooters. Of these, 10 were at a school or university. So, violence, especially through the use of guns, is very much American.

Violence and guns have played an unfortunate role in American political life as well. As many as four American presidents, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John Kennedy, have been assassinated while in office. Several others have faced attacks and survived.

There have been several attempted assassinations of presidential candidates and presidents-elects such as Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D Roosevelt, his successor Harry Truman, Robert F Kennedy, George Wallace, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and now Donald Trump.

There have been other kinds of violence too, such as the attempted insurrection to prevent Biden from being declared president on 6 January 2021. Nine people lost their lives in that attack by pro-Trump "activists" on the Capitol that day. Many believe that Trump himself instigated the incident.

Americans claim that their special relationship with guns goes back to their origins when they launched an armed rebellion against British rulers and succeeded in creating a nation.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution says that “a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Guns Have Become Harder to Regulate

In recent years, the conservative Supreme Court has blocked attempts at gun control on various pretexts.

In an important judgment in 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing the majority judgement in a case against a ban on handguns in Washington DC, argued that the Second Amendment does not protect the right to guns in relation to militia service alone, but supports an individual right to possess guns and to use them for traditionally lawful purposes. This judgement has made efforts to restrict guns difficult.

In 2022, this judgement was expanded when it was decided that people could carry guns outside their homes for self-defence. Gun laws, this judgment said, needed to be rooted in “historical tradition.”

This is a strange judgment because the courts have prevented efforts to restrict assault weapons and semi-automatic rifles with bump stocks which make them machine guns of a kind. None of these weapons would have been in existence in the late 18th century United States (“historical tradition") upon which the Supreme Court rulings are relying.

American democracy has proved to be resilient in the past. After all, it went through a bloody civil war in the 1860s and overcame that trauma. In the 1960s, it went through intense strife with the rise of anti-Vietnam war protests and the Civil Rights Movement

This is also a period that saw three major assassinations — John Kennedy in 1963, Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968.

There is a lot of speculation that the shock effect of Trump's shooting will induce moderation in the country’s fevered polity. In the past, such events have indeed brought a touch of moderation.

But Trump and the Trump era are sui generis and may not follow any established historical pattern. This has been a particularly toxic period where the Democrats are viewing Trump as a threat to democracy, and the latter believes that the Biden Administration is using the legal system to strong-arm him.

According to a poll, 60 percent of American adults agreed that elections would not solve their major political and social problems. The problem is that there are just too many Americans out there who believe that their gun can and will do the needful.

(The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)