Shooting at Trump was WRONG
Wrong and unsurprising.
If you have not yet heard (somehow), yesterday at a political rally someone apparently fired at least one gunshot at former US President Donald Trump.
Let me be exceptionally clear—that was WRONG, and no one should be happy about it or otherwise defend it.
It is far too soon to speculate about what happened, and I will not engage in that here. Anyone doing otherwise is simply adding fuel to the fire of this dangerous political moment in America.
But what I will say is that this should surprise no one. Every ingredient in such a recipe has been omnipresent and what has happened just now was, quite frankly, inevitable.
America is a supposedly civilized or, as some call it, “advanced” country that nonetheless is replete with guns. It has a gun culture built on myth and false bravado, supported by courts and politicians who oppose virtually any measure seeking to rectify or at least mitigate the problem, who couch their opposition in claims of protecting a constitutional amendment about “gun rights” in ways that require a patent misreading of that amendment and discounting of its history.
Police in America kill people at exponentially higher rates than any other so-called advanced country. Guns are the number one cause of death for children of a certain age group. Each year, a population equivalent to a medium-sized town die by bullet; many, many more are injured. Disaffected men (97%) regularly murder several people at once, often on the basis of race or religion.
Peaceful protest is treated like a crime, despite its protection right within the very first amendment.
Add to that a political climate in which definitive sides have been drawn. This has set family and friends against each other, littered social media with vitriol and hate, and contributed to a tidal wave of misinformation. For any historian, the parallels of today to equally perilous days past are undeniable.
Source: Facebook - user identity redacted
One of those sides, however, has ratcheted up the hyperbole. Over the past few years, particularly following Trump’s various indictments for his rampant lawbreaking, and at least one criminal conviction by a jury, people of this camp have inflamed the masses by suggesting or outright calling for violence. Death threats against politicians, judges, jurors, and others opposing Trump or involved in his cases are through the roof. And of course, there was January 6th.
Just a little more than a week ago, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a group that has written a manual on dismantling the government and is actively conspiring to execute it if Trump wins, publicly announced, “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” He is not the first to make pronouncements about a desire to “overthrow” democracy.
So I ask, what did you expect?
Regardless what political figure was targeted, this was going to happen. And indeed, it may well happen again. When you put the kindling in place (the guns) and set it aflame (the rhetoric), you end up with a conflagration.
I am sick of living in a culture of violence, a veritable shooting gallery where I worry for family members and friends every time they go out. I don’t give a damn who is firing at who, because no one should be doing it at all.
Patriotism is not wishing violence on those who hold different views. It is not threatening to overthrow government out of petulant ire over the advancement of ‘others’ or to obtain some profitable advantage. It is not demanding the right to commit crimes with impunity while condemning those seeking justice for the commission of those crimes.
None of this shit is progress, it is a fall into barbarism—a trip into the abyss we have undertaken for some time now… with all too much vigor.
Enough is enough.
