It was a shot heard round the world – but most of all by presidential candidate Donald Trump, the victim of Saturday’s assassination attempt at a presidential rally in the US state of Pennsylvania.
A bullet grazed Trump’s right ear as he was filling the audience in on his plans to make United States immigration policy even more hellish for refuge seekers. One crowd member was killed in the gunfire and two others wounded. The shooter, identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot and killed by Secret Service officers.
The episode will no doubt earn Trump substantial points among supporters, who will be ever more convinced that their hero is under existential attack in his sociopathic quest to “Make America Great Again”.
And while much of the analysis in the aftermath of the Pennsylvania rally has focused on the “polarisation” of the US citizenry, it is also worth pointing out the bleeding obvious – that firearms-related bloodshed would not transpire with such regularity if the country did not have more guns than people.
Earlier this year, Trump himself addressed an event held by the National Rifle Association – in none other than Pennsylvania, it so happens – during which he promised attendees that, if he is re-elected, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms”.
He went on to declare that he would reverse the damage allegedly done by President Joe Biden to America’s gun landscape: “Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day”.
Not that Biden’s, um, “attack” has been going so well. Recall the May 2022 massacre of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which was merely one of numerous domestic bloodbaths to take place on the current president’s watch. The US continues to average more than one mass shooting per day – with “mass shooting” indicating an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed from gunfire, not including the shooter.
On Saturday, the same day as the Trump rally, four people were killed and at least 10 were injured in a mass shooting at a nightclub in Birmingham, Alabama.
Then, of course, there is the US’s lengthy history of shooting up people en masse across the world, which only adds fuel to the (gun)fire at home by teaching Americans that human life is of negligible value and that everything is just one big video game anyway.
In addition to the more hands-on, do-it-yourself killing sprees in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US is also a key player in Israel’s ongoing efforts to annihilate the population of the Gaza Strip. The latest genocidal assault has officially killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza in just over nine months, although a recent Lancet study found that the true death toll could exceed 186,000 people.
Despite Biden’s threats to withhold delivery to the Israeli military of certain offensive weapons, a Reuters exclusive published on June 28 revealed that the US had thus far “transferred at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions”.
How’s that for gun control?
At the end of the day, America’s gun fixation and shoot-’em-up mentality have predictable repercussions on the country’s political culture. In a 2009 report, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) tabulated 15 occasions on which direct assaults had been perpetrated against US presidents, presidents-elect, and presidential candidates. Four such assaults had resulted in death, as in the cases of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James A Garfield, William McKinley, and John F Kennedy.
The first recorded assault took place on January 30, 1835, and targeted President Andrew Jackson, who survived when the pistol misfired. As per the explanation provided by CRS, Jackson’s assailant Richard Lawrence “said Jackson was preventing him from obtaining large sums of money and was ruining the country”.
Another failed assault occurred on October 29, 1994, when assailant Francisco M Duran fired a semiautomatic assault rifle at the White House while President Bill Clinton was inside. The CRS report does not provide a motive in this case, but a 1995 New York Times article specifies that the jury for Duran’s trial had “rejected defense arguments that Mr. Duran was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and thought he had been chosen to shoot and kill an evil ‘mist’ that was enveloping the White House”.
To be sure, psychological instability is often invoked as a factor in US shootings – whether political or otherwise – although the official discourse tends to avoid mentioning the outsized role of US capitalism in literally fuelling mental illness in the country.
And yet it is hardly far-fetched to argue that America’s toxic cult of individualism might on some occasions lead folks to believe that the only way to accomplish anything is by taking matters – and guns – into their own hands.
Following Trump’s own brush with death, one wonders whether he’ll think back on his advice to Iowa residents devastated by a January school shooting: “Get over it”.
As they say, you reap what you sow. And if there is one thing the US needs to get over, it is the “right to bear arms”.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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