The murder of conservative activist and broadcaster Charlie Kirk, this week, has inflamed already rising fears about political violence in the United States.
The attack on Mr Kirk, while he spoke to students at Utah Valley University, was the latest in a grim litany of incidents.
In June, a wannabe assassin targeted two Democrats in Minnesota and succeeded in killing one of them, along with her husband.
In April, someone tried to burn down the house of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro while he and his family were inside.
During last year’s presidential election campaign, there were two attempts to kill Donald Trump, one of which very nearly succeeded, with the bullet grazing his ear.
Last December, Brian Thompson, the CEO of a health insurance company, was murdered on the streets of New York.
We could keep going, with these examples, for some time.
The assault on former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
An alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
The shooting of a senior Republican Congressman, Steve Scalise.
The near-fatal assassination attempt on Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
The mob that fought police and hunted for politicians inside the halls of Congress, while chanting about hanging the Vice President.
Little wonder that, after Mr Kirk’s death, members of Congress are reportedly “scared to death” of threats to their own safety, and are seeking to boost their security.
Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace has cancelled all her public outdoor events, and says she intends to have a gun on her “at all times”. She’s not alone in that stance.
And House Speaker Mike Johnson says there have been thousands more threats to members of Congress, this year, than in 2024.
Why wouldn’t they be worried? Mr Kirk’s murder is a reminder, as if one were needed, that they live in a country where some people believe they deserve to die for their opinions. All it takes is one radicalised lunatic with a gun, in a nation where there are more guns than human beings and astonishingly few restrictions on accessing them.
‘A shock, but not a surprise’
Every country has people with the potential to turn violent; there’s nothing special about the United States in that regard. But bloodshed has nevertheless marked much of US history.
The nation began with a war for its independence. Less than a century later, it descended into a full-blown civil war. Politically tinged violence exploded in the 1960s, with multiple famous figures assassinated, including the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr.
Four US presidents have been murdered, three more have been shot, and we know about plots, of varying degrees of seriousness and competence, to assassinate at least 15 of them.
What if the relative calmness of the 1990s and 2000s – and I really do stress the word relative, there – was an aberration? What if the norm in America is for political violence to be common, and we’ve swung back in that direction?
One risk factor is motive. Are Americans more likely now than they have been in the past to develop murderous intent? We’ll get to that. First though, another factor: opportunity.
I said every nation has people with the potential to be violent. Most at least try to make it difficult for those people to get their hands on deadly weapons.
America, notoriously, prefers a lighter touch, for reasons Mr Kirk himself often explained.
“I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” he said in 2023, for example.
I share this quote not to dunk on Mr Kirk, or shame him or whatever. We’re not interested in victim-blaming. There’s just such a twisted level of irony here.
The result of America’s relaxed attitude towards gun deaths is apparent in its obscene homicide rate, which is almost seven times higher than Australia’s. It is much, much easier for an American who’s become mentally unbalanced to kill someone. And if the goal is a targeted assassination, they can do it at range.
(Mr Kirk’s attacker is believed to have shot him from well over a hundred metres away. You can’t do that with a knife.)
Shortly after Mr Kirk was attacked – though it got relatively little attention amid all the political noise – there was a shooting at a high school in Colorado. One of dozens recorded across America this year.
Consider that for a second. The country’s gun violence is so frequent that two horrific shooting can happen at practically the same time, causing one to drown out the other.
“It’s always a shock, when it happens, but it’s not a surprise,” Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, told news.com.au.
“Gun violence in the United States is as American as apple pie. It happens all the time. It happens at every level.
“It’s part of the fabric of American life. So at the moment, of course, it’s a shock. Oh, my goodness, someone has been killed, murdered. But there’s nothing unusual about it.
“I don’t know if it’s getting worse. I just think it’s endemic.”
He stressed that incidents like Mr Kirk’s murder will continue to happen until Americans “talk seriously” about addressing their gun laws.
What of the other element, though, the motivations behind political violence?
“It’s a broader problem that has been with us in modern times, since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. You know, in our lifetimes, George Wallace was the victim of an attempt. There were two attempts on Gerald Ford that failed. So again, it’s just part of the fabric (of US society),” said Mr Wolpe.
“But there is a new level of hyper-partisanship. It’s been brewing for at least 30 years, since Newt Gingrich and shifted the Republican Party and their take over the House in the 90s to today,” he added.
“I don’t see anything to break this, to stop this ugly momentum. I just think it’s going to continue for a while.
“Ultimately, these are leadership issues. I mean, if Trump stood up and said we need to do something about semiautomatic weapons, that would be a big deal, but he wants to cultivate and benefit from his support from the far-right gun movement.
“That’s the way politics are. It’s horrific. It is horrific. But that’s the way it’s going to continue until many stand up on both sides and just say, ‘We’ve had enough.’”
The hyper-partisanship Mr Wolpe mentioned has been evident, to say the least, in the fallout from the Kirk shooting.
Mr Trump immediately pinned the murder on “the radical left”, before anything about the culprit was known. He said his opponents’ rhetoric was “directly responsible for the terrorism we’re seeing in our country”, and listed incidents of violence against conservative figures (he conveniently omitted every comparable example of violence against Democrats).
He was echoed by most of the conservative media, while some more strident voices went so far as to call for Mr Kirk to be “avenged”.
“They want us dead. They’re killing us,” said political commentator Matt Walsh, without specifying who the “they” in question were.
“Now is not the time for kumbaya stuff. This is real.”
Billionaire Elon Musk cast a similarly wide net of blame, labelling the Democrats “the party of murder”.
There was deeply unedifying rhetoric from some extreme lefties on social media too, expressing a pointed lack of regret at Mr Kirk’s death, or at least claiming he was undeserving of being remembered fondly. That attitude, thankfully, did not seep into the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
“Whoever has done this, there will be a forensic political examination of them,” said Mr Wolpe (he spoke to us before the suspect was identified).
“We’re already at a hyper-partisan stage in our political life in America, and that will lead to those fissures getting deeper.”
He cited a quote from Mr Trump’s deputy chief of staff in the White House, Stephen Miller, who said “all of us must now dedicate ourselves to defeating the evil that stole Charlie from the world”.
“And the evil is not the gun. The evil is the political motive. So this enters the culture wars, the political wars, the wars of dominance over America’s future,” said Mr Wolpe.
In the past, presidents from both sides took a deliberately measured approach to moments of political violence, urging Americans to remain calm and stressing the need for unity.
Mr Trump’s response, this week, was to do the opposite.
“What do we do about our country? We have radicals on the right and left, people are watching videos and cheering, some people are cheering that Charlie was killed. How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked on Fox News on Friday morning, US time.
“I’ll tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” Mr Trump responded, before going on to suggest extremists on the right were justified in their views.
“Radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime.”
How does this spiral of violence, particularly gun violence, stop? Can it even be stopped? Mr Wolpe said the right kind of leadership would have to start at the “grassroots” level.
“Cities, and then states, then maybe agglomerations of states,” he said.
“But state borders are porous you know, and it’s just not hard to get a gun.
“You’ve got to start somewhere though, if you do want to try to do something, and give people hope. Right now, people don’t have any hope that this is going to end.”
