The Right Way to Politicize This
Yes, after the Donald Trump shooting, now is a good time to talk about the need for better gun laws.
Former president Donald Trump is rushed offstage after being grazed by a bullet during a rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Donald Trump was a reality TV host before he was president, and whatever else he is, he’s a consummate showman. On Saturday, he was shot at a rally. The bullet grazed his ear. A few inches off, and he would be dead. Showing a presence of mind, as he was getting whisked from the stage, he mouthed the word “fight” three times to the crowd while pumping his fist. The audience responded with chants of “USA! USA!”
The pictures of Trump pumping his fist as blood ran down his face became instantly iconic. While only time will tell, many despondent progressives concluded that the election was essentially over.
The attempted assassination of a former president — and the leading candidate in this year’s election — was a shocking act of political violence. Conspiracy theories quickly proliferated in some corners of the internet, since this is America in 2024 and online conspiracy theories rapidly proliferate about any shocking high-profile political event. At one point, “Staged” was trending on Twitter.
The assassination attempt was instantly and correctly condemned by figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just as it was by leading voices across the rest of the political spectrum. I have seen lots of people point out that, for example, more sympathy has been expressed for Donald Trump — a grotesque figure on any reasonable accounting — than for the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians murdered in Gaza in the last nine months, and this is true, but it shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that these figures were correct to condemn the attempted assassination. Focusing on our ideological enemies’ hypocrisy is often tempting precisely because it lets us off the hook from having to figure out our own principles and values. And I’d argue that, in this case, those principles should be relatively clear.
You don’t have to be an absolute pacifist, or anything like one, to understand that normalizing this kind of violence would be a disastrous direction for our society to go down. Violence in general should require a high threshold of moral justification, and nothing remotely good would come from this kind of assassination — which would, if anything, further radicalize Trump’s supporters and be used to justify waves of extreme political repression.
Stochastic Terrorism?
Senator J. D. Vance (R-OH) immediately responded to the assassination attempt by blaming the White House — tweeting that the attempt was not just an “isolated incident” but a reflection of the Biden campaign’s core themes about Trump’s threat to democracy. In effect, conservatives like Vance are appropriating the idea, long put forward by some liberals, that overheated political rhetoric is itself a form of violence. The theory of “stochastic terrorism” holds that over-the-top rhetoric about a targeted individual or group has the effect of encouraging “lone-wolf” political violence — that is to say, political violence carried out by individuals on their own initiative rather than terrorist organizations — and that this makes the purveyors of the rhetoric responsible for the violence.
I’ve never seen anyone consistently apply this theory. Invariably, overheated rhetoric that one finds unfair or irresponsible is blamed for violence against the targets of that rhetoric. Equally white-hot rhetoric that one agrees with, or that is put forward by factions to which one is basically sympathetic, is given a more nuanced treatment, and (appropriate) skepticism is applied to the chain of causation.
If you’re an antiabortionist who calls abortion murder, you might still think this doesn’t justify the murderers of abortion doctors taking the law into their own hands. If you’re a left-liberal who believes Trump is literally a fascist, you might point out that it hardly follows from this that shooting him would diminish the fascist threat. In all cases, I’d argue that the “stochastic terrorism” theory dangerously undermines free-speech norms by blurring the line between speech and violence. Let’s not go down that road.
341 Million People and 393 Million Guns
In any case, the attempted assassin — Thomas Matthew Crooks — was likely not motivated by progressive outrage against Trump. We’re still very much in a “fog of war” situation where many facts remain to be sorted out, but current reports show that he seems to be a registered Republican. Someone with the same name and zip code donated to a Democratic PAC a few years ago. People who engage in lone-wolf political violence often seem to be mentally unstable individuals with ideologically incoherent mishmashes of political views. Even when a killer leaves a manifesto, sorting through their ravings to find evidence of ideological influences often renders confusing results.
Trump himself, of course, is a bubbling fountain of overheated political rhetoric who tried to overturn a democratic election and often spreads incendiary and dehumanizing rhetoric about liberals, the media, undocumented immigrants, and so on. The attempted assassination should not be excused, but it’s unsurprising that a figure like that would inspire extreme reactions, and unsurprising that some unstable people might be inspired to do something dangerous and stupid.
If we’re serious about diminishing the incidence of lone-wolf political violence in the United States, lecturing people to tone down the way they talk about figures like Donald Trump is unlikely to be an effective strategy. A more fruitful area to focus on is America’s gun laws, which are bizarrely permissive by the standards of other advanced democracies. Nearly 342 million people live in this country, and we have about 393 million guns. If you want fewer political shootings, and fewer shootings in general, it’s long past time to do something about that.