It’s the Guns, It’s the Guns, It’s the Guns

Sunday, 14 July 2024

Josh Marshall, writing at Talking Points Memo:

Political violence and especially electoral violence strike at the heart of the open, free and democratic choice-making upon which our civic democratic system and the legitimacy of its choices are based. We must condemn it in every instance as well as expressing our personal sympathy for its victims. We do so not to box check some vague concept of civility or comity but because it strikes at the taproot of civil peace. It is equally not a license to squelch political speech or in this case threaten or intimidate those calling attention to the real and profound dangers of Donald Trump returning to the White House. We are already seeing this attempt in the making.

Political violence is abhorrent, and as Marshall aptly notes, strikes at the heart of the very concept of democracy. Words cannot express strongly enough the feelings that an event like yesterday’s evokes, no matter which side of the political spectrum we’re on. We call many things “unacceptable” but an assassination attempt is more than that. It’s sick, and, correctly, makes us feel sick. It’s like how our bodies revolt when we consume poison. An assassination attempt is poison to the body politic.

But only one of the candidates in this election has ever incited political violence. That candidate is Donald Trump, particularly and especially on January 6, 2021. Only one candidate has ever mocked and cracked jokes about a near-miss assassination attempt against one of his political adversaries. That candidate is Donald Trump, who (along with his son) has repeatedly mocked Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul after an unhinged lunatic, asking “Where is Nancy?”, broke into their home and bashed Paul Pelosi’s head with a hammer, fracturing his skull to an extent that required surgery.

Donald Trump wasn’t an inch away from assassination because of Democratic rhetoric against his threat to democracy. He is a threat to democracy. He threatened democracy on national television. He has repeated, literally hundreds of times over the last three and a half years, that the fairest election this nation has ever held was “rigged” because he lost. Ask him today and he’ll say the same. Give Trump credit: he fully admits that the only election results he will accept are results that declare him the winner. But that, quite literally, is a threat to our democracy. He tried to remain in office after losing, by almost the exact same Electoral College margin he declared “a massive landslide victory” when he won in 2016, by overthrowing the duly elected government of the United States. Ask him today if he should still be in the White House.

Do not accept, not even at this fraught moment, the claims of anyone blaming yesterday on Democrats describing Trump as a threat to democracy. Saying so is not even on the spectrum of hyperbole. We saw what we saw after the 2020 election, and especially on January 6.

Do not fret, either, that yesterday’s event somehow cedes the election to Trump, on the grounds that he survived and projected strength. The side that wants a strongman was already voting for him. They’re the same people who claimed, wrongly, that being convicted of 34 felonies somehow helped him electorally. This is, no question, an indelible image and a photo for the ages. But Teddy Roosevelt was shot campaigning in 1912 — and unlike Trump took the stage to deliver his speech after taking the bullet — and lost the election by 347 Electoral College votes (an actual landslide) to Woodrow Wilson. Running for president for the third time in 1972, virulently racist Alabama governor George Wallace was shot, leaving him paralyzed. Wallace lost the primary. Gerald Ford survived not just one but two shooting attempts within 17 days in 1975. Ford wore a bulletproof trench coat in public for the remainder of his term. He lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter. (It was quite close.)

The truth is that our nation, great though it is in so many ways, has a horrific history of political violence and a seemingly innate obsession with firearms. Four presidents have been assassinated in office — Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1881, McKinley in 1901, and Kennedy in 1963 — all by gunshots. Three more — Roosevelt, Reagan (who nearly died), and now Trump — have been wounded by gunshots. And there have been numerous other failed attempts, including a nut who fired shots into the White House during Barack Obama’s first term in 2011.

Also, yesterday’s events will be old news by election day. There are 113 days until November 5. It’s been 129 days since Joe Biden’s strong State of the Union speech. Does that State of the Union feel recent to you today? That’s how old yesterday’s shooting will feel when we vote.

So here is what the Democrats should do. Tomorrow morning Chuck Schumer should put on the floor of the Senate a law mandating strict background checks for all gun purchases. Perhaps tie it to a reinstitution of the 1994 assault weapons ban that Republicans allowed to expire in 2004. Give it a name like the “Anti Political and School Violence Act”. Make Republicans shoot it down. Make them say, as Trump himself did after a school shooting massacre in Iowa this year, that we “have to get over it, we have to move forward.” It’s not just an outrage when your right-wing authoritarian hero gets his ear nicked by an assassin’s bullet. It’s an outrage when anyone is shot by a nut with a gun.

Make them say it. See how that flies.