Whatever the ultimate motivation for the attempt on Trump’s life turns out to be, it’s pretty easy to do the math when it comes to the aggravating factors which made such an act of violence more likely to happen:
- As I’m writing this, there is no known motive for the shooting yet, but the explanation is likely to be either political in nature, a function of the perpetrator’s mental health, or some combination of the two;
- As to the former possibility: we’re a country which has become extraordinarily polarized and which has turned what once were mere policy disagreements into Us vs. Them absolutism;
- Meanwhile, extremists have worked hard to normalize political violence over the past several years, encouraging that violence and calling those people who would murder public officials “heroes” who do not deserve punishment. We are likewise awash with political rhetoric that speaks of carnage, bloodbaths, retribution, and the dehumanization of one’s opponents;
- As to the latter possibility: we’re also a country which makes obtaining proper mental health treatment damn nigh impossible to access for vast swaths of the populace, particularly young adults, which makes it far more likely that sick people will become alienated and isolated people and that alienated and isolated people will become dangerous, to themselves or to others; finally
- We’re a country awash in guns and gun culture which has gone comically out of its way to ensure that anyone who wants to purchase and use high-powered weapons for any reason or no reason whatsoever can do so and no one can say shit about it. We have a long, bloody chronicle of what that hath wrought.
It’s not hard to guess what kind of soup you’re going to end up with when you throw those ingredients into the pot.
Finally, however much I would like Donald Trump to not become president again, no good can come from or could have possibly come from such an act of violence, successfully carried our or otherwise.
Hopefully that’s obvious to everyone morally and ethically speaking. But it’s also the case strategically. Violence is ugly in practice and unpredictable as a tool. It leads to vicious cycles of recrimination, demonization, and guilt by association all the while competing claims of righteousness, victimization, and even martyrdom are deployed to muddy the waters. Political violence is a weapon over which its wielder has far, far less control than he or she could possibly imagine, it almost uniformly fails to achieve the ends its wielder predicted, and it always — always — creates side effects and unintended consequences which hurt far more people and far different people than the wielder of the weapon ever envisioned.
Whatever else one can say about this, democracy is hanging by a goddamn thread in this country right now. Injecting even more violence into the system than it is already experiencing weakens it even more. We must beat our opponents in the court of public opinion and at fair and free ballot boxes and we must punish wrongdoers via the good faith use of the criminal justice system. Those are the only legitimate options. In all else lies madness.