Saturday’s shooting was not “un-American”. Gun violence and mass killing followed by thoughts and prayers and Republican resistance to gun control are as American as apple pie. The AR-15 semi-automatic used in the attack, the weapon of choice for mass murderers, forms the centrepiece of glossy Republican family Christmas cards. Congress members flaunt AR-15 lapel pins.
They are in lockstep with Donald Trump, who by a wild ironic twist is now the world’s most prominent victim of the AR-15. In one of his earliest White House decisions he stopped dead a law change that would have kept guns out of the hands of people whose mental illness made them dangerous. Two years ago a Republican-controlled Congress considered, but decided not to ban, the purchase of AR-15s by 18- to 20-year-olds. The AR-15 is banned in nine states.
Recall Trump’s chilling words at a rally in August 2016 when he addressed Hillary Clinton’s ability to choose members of the Supreme Court: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people – maybe there is, I don’t know”.
When a second amendment fan came for Trump himself in Pennsylvania it was in the shape of a 20-year-old nursing home employee who murdered a 50-year-old father of two daughters and critically injured a 57-year-old former US Marine Corps veteran and a 74-year-old registered Democrat. The dead and injured did not have the do-or-die protection of a Secret Service detail nor the power to order lethally exposed officers to “wait!”, as Trump demanded, while fashioning himself an alpha male image for the ages. In a gun rights culture everyone must be ready to take a bullet – but not everyone is protected equally from the fallout.
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These must be cheering scenes for all the schoolteachers shepherding their small charges into cupboards for a lockdown drill this week after a decade that has seen over 500 school shootings. About a quarter of teachers say they experienced a lockdown in the 2022-23 school year because of a gun or suspicion of one at their school, according to Pew Research.
When Senator Marco Rubio – still a gushing vice-presidential hopeful on Sunday – posted the iconic fist pump with the caption “God protected President Trump”, the response was snarky. “Yeah, the Lord guided that bullet right into one of his supporters,” said one. The father of a student killed in the Parkland school mass shooting asked if the senator was suggesting that God did not protect his daughter and the others killed that day. Even God must get confused at times.
After almost every high-profile shooting the immediate response from the gun rights blowhards is the same: desperate efforts to define the shooter as “alien” – foreign, African American, Muslim, transgender, Democrat/communist/lefty types; protesting that it’s too soon to discuss the tragedy; complaining that the tragedy is being politicised; urging people to move on – as Trump did in Iowa following the mass shooting by a 17-year-old at Perry High School. The strategy works because it avoids real conversations about gun violence and gives those in denial someone to blame.
Sure enough, the initial response to the Trump shooting was photos of a trans woman with the assertion that she was the culprit. The next was to ignore the gunman’s Republican registration or call it a false flag. Another was to paint political assassinations as an exclusively lefty pursuit, which takes about a minute’s research to puncture. The last was to raise the victim to martyr status forever freed from criticism.
A detestation of political violence is in the DNA of all democrats whatever their politics. But how can Americans denounce violence in this case when the victim also happens to be one of American’s most influential exponents of violence?
It’s only five years since a disgraced Trump incited a violent mob to attempt to overturn the result of a legitimate election and threaten to hang his vice-president. Just last March he said there would be a “bloodbath” if he is not elected in November. He shared a doctored image of Joe Biden hog-tied in the back of a truck with TRUMP 4US plates. These facts do not change regardless of any despicable threat to his life.
The leader of the pro-Trump Project 2025 talks up a second revolution, saying it will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”. A director of the conservative Heritage Foundation has already declared a “zero per cent chance of a free and fair election”, accusing the Biden administration of creating conditions where policymakers cannot certify an election.
The upside is that Republicans have suddenly realised that rhetoric can indeed inspire violent attacks. Someone should tell them about January 6th.
In the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, tweeted that “the entire campaign message of the Democrat Party has been the vile and monstrous lie that Trump and the GOP are trying to end democracy. This mammoth lie, this sinister poison, this terrible hate and defamation, must stop. It must stop”. “Ok then,” went one reply, “accept the 2020 election result. Right now. Right here. Go on.” Accept democracy, in other words.
If the Democrat party message is indeed a vile and monstrous lie it should be easy to fix. Trump promised to use his speech at the Republican National Convention to “bring the country together”. Suppose he mustered the moral and physical courage to say two boringly normal things: 1. Violence is never acceptable in politics. 2. The results of the election will be respected.
For a “small d” democrat it should be as simple as that. The fact that it is unimaginable tells us all we need to know.