A lot of talking heads on television and a lot of politicians on social media said they were shocked at the shooting in Butler, Pa. Some spoke of "political violence" as if it's distinct from all other violence that occurs every day in the USA — as if the political arena exists on some higher ground where violence should have no place. That's a ridiculous notion, though I understand why people want to make this distinction. In America, we are supposed to vote, not shoot. When we speak of a tenet of American democracy, we speak of "the peaceful transfer of power," though the Jan. 6 rioters, inspired by Trump, must have missed civics class that day.
Last night, Mike Kelly, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, where the attempt on Trump's life occurred, said the U.S. is "now a third world country" because of the shooting. "There is something dramatically wrong with this country right now," he said.
Right now? I had to wonder where this cat had been for the last 50 or 60 years. This country has millions of guns, liberal gun laws promulgated mostly by Republican state and federal legislators, and lots of untreated mental illness. That's the perfect recipe for the violent nation we have become. Violent crime is down in Joe Biden's time, but we still have shootings of four or more people on a regular basis. Here's the latest chart on mass shootings from the Gun Violence Archive:
Trump was not killed. He's lucky. The people at his rally are lucky that the shooter apparently did not have a bump stock that would have turned his assault-style rifle into a machine gun that the Supreme Court recently said is not really a machine gun.
Spare me your shock.
Years ago, I was fishing with Bill Burton and Calvert Bregel, two of my older, wiser friends. We were knee-deep in the Gunpowder River, in northern Baltimore County.
"You know what?" Calvert said, looking downstream and squinting, as if to dislodge a memory. "I haven't been here in a long time, but I think there used to be a nice covered bridge over this river."
Indeed, there had been, and just 200 yards downstream from where we were fishing. The bridge had been built in the 1880s. It had lasted almost a century.
"Someone burned it down," I said.
When I looked over, Calvert was staring at me, and it was an incredulous stare. Burn a covered bridge? Covered bridges were cherished relics of the country's horse-drawn past, landmarks of the American odyssey. Burn a bridge? Calvert could not comprehend the intentional destruction of something so useful, idyllic and historic.
"What happened?" he said, and he wasn't asking for details of the arson. "What happened?" was a much larger question about the profound and disturbing changes that had occurred in the country over the last few decades.
"They killed Kennedy, didn't they?" I said, all of a sudden.
I don't know where that came from, but there it was — floating in the chilly autumn air over the Gunpowder River. "They killed Kennedy."
"Yes," Calvert said, looking both stunned at the leap and nodding agreement with it. "You know, I've had that same thought many times myself. That it all started back then, when they killed JFK …"
Historians, who are clinical and logical, tend to avoid ascribing big societal changes to any single event, and I generally defer to that perspective.
But it's impossible to look back 60 years, to recall Dallas, and not feel crushing loss and the gone-forever of an ideal in some corner of your soul. If you were too young to understand it at the time, you certainly saw it in the faces of the elders around you. I did.
It's hard to look back to a day when a president traveled in an open limousine and not see a panorama of the violence that followed — the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the age of the gun, the death of John Lennon, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, the mass shootings, and the great and awful pileup of daily deaths of our fellow Americans, including police officers and school children, in every decade since. Thousands of deaths by gun, and conservative politicians — the ones now claiming shock — unwilling to do anything about it.
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