Are assassination attempts now just a ‘fact of life’?
In our gun-mad culture, we can keep neither our schoolchildren nor political leaders safe.
This month, after a school shooting in Georgia claimed four lives, Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, argued that school shootings are just a “fact of life.”
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” the Ohio senator said. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.”
Less than two weeks later, after what appears to have been a second assassination attempt against Trump, it now looks as though even “hard” targets — the once and perhaps future president — are a lot more soft than we would like them to be. In our gun-mad culture, we can keep neither our schoolchildren nor political leaders safe.
Now will come more, necessary efforts to fortify the Secret Service. President Joe Biden acknowledged this on Monday when he said the Secret Service “needs more help.” But there’s only so much “hardening” of targets, whether schools or presidential candidates, that can be done. A civilized society can’t ignore the obvious commonality between the assassination attempts and the Georgia school shooting: They all involved assault rifles. It was an AR-15-style weapon in the Georgia school shooting and in the first attempt against Trump. In Florida on Sunday, the suspected gunman had an SKS-style rifle with him in the bushes on the golf course a few hundred yards from the former president.
This reflects the overall shift in patterns of gun violence. Until recent years, handguns were the weapons of choice in mass shootings, but that has shifted in the past few years to AR- and similar-style rifles. This helps to explain why, as the Violence Prevention Project has found, half of the 36 deadliest mass shootings in the past 120 years occurred in the last decade.
There have been 393 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, and 12,136 people have been killed by gun violence, according to the Gun Violence Archive. I’m thankful that none of our high officeholders is among those. But if our gun laws continue to allow deranged people to have unlimited access to weapons of war, it’s likely that those psychos who want to make headlines, as Vance puts it, will keep taking shots at our leaders.
Of course, this is the last thing you’re going to hear from Trump and Vance. Instead, the GOP nominee went right to the baseless claim that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are to blame for the possible assassination attempt. “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” Trump predicted — or possibly threatened — in a social-media post Monday afternoon.
Trump told Fox News on Monday that the would-be gunman “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it. Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at.” He went on to call his opponents “the enemy from within,” a phrase used by authoritarians. He said both this perpetrator and the July shooter were motivated by the Democrats’ rhetoric and the “lawsuits they wrap me up in.”
Trump issued a series of statements, social media posts and even fundraising appeals attempting to profit from the incident. Meanwhile, Trump surrogates such as Laura Loomer and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) spread a conspiracy theory online suggesting the gunman had inside information on Trump’s whereabouts.
And, so, another near disaster became just another excuse to plant more disinformation.
Trump ally Elon Musk used his X platform to muse about why “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” with a chin-stroking emoji. He later deleted the post, saying this was somehow a joke.
It’s patently false, in fact. The same gunman who fired at Trump in July had targeted Biden, too; Trump represented a target of opportunity. And an intruder targeted then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) two years ago, fracturing her husband’s skull after finding that she wasn’t home. Trump joked about that attack just 10 days ago.
Blaming Democrats’ rhetoric is equally absurd. The July shooter was a registered Republican with no identified political motive. The suspected golf course gunman apparently voted for Trump in 2016 before turning against him and later expressing support for Tulsi Gabbard, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, while also giving small-dollar contributions to Democrats.
Both would-be assassins were, by definition, madmen. There is no credible evidence that either was motivated by Democratic rhetoric, and the primary example of inflammatory rhetoric Trump and his allies are citing — calling Trump a threat to democracy — isn’t a call to violence. It’s a statement of fact: He instigated an attack on the Capitol to overturn a free and fair election, and he later called for the “termination” of the Constitution. Contrast that with what’s happening in Springfield, Ohio, where schools have been evacuated multiple times over threats stirred up by the false claims, spread by Trump and Vance, that Haitian migrants there are eating dogs and cats.
There have been assassination attempts, and assassinations, throughout our history. There will always be maniacs who want to take a shot at those in high office. The difference now is these maniacs have unfettered access to astonishingly destructive weapons.
“It wasn’t rhetoric in the bushes. It was an SKS,” says Emma Brown, head of the anti-gun violence group Giffords. “The clearest takeaway from this alarming and terrifying fact is this is not a country where anybody is safe from gun violence.”
This isn’t a fact of life. It’s a choice.
Opinion by Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His latest book, "Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theories and Dunces who Burned Down the House" (Little, Brown) is out September 24.
