Assassination attempt on Trump latest in stream of violence coursing through US body politic

NEW YORK — The assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the Republican contender for President, is the latest incident in the stream of violence that has coursed through US body politic.

Gun control is one of the most divisive elements in the politics of a nation with the highest rate of firearm violence among industrialised countries where 18,854 people perished from gunshots, including accidental firings and suicides last year according to the Gun Violence Archives, and so far this year 9,102.

Trump opposes gun control along with his Republican political base — and is not expected to change now — while for President Biden limiting their availability is an article of faith.

Gun violence, inevitability, spills into politics and its consequences become fodder for electoral rhetoric.

When he was the front-runner for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1968, Robert F Kennedy was killed while the campaign was in full swing. The assassin was a Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan.

Two months earlier, Martin Luther King, the Mahatma Gandhi-inspired champion of human rights, had been assassinated.

President John Kennedy — Robert Kennedy’s brother — had been assassinated just five years earlier, the last in a line of presidents killed in office starting with Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

The killing of presidents, James A. Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901 followed. Like Lincoln, they were also Republicans.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt suffering a punctured lung and heavy internal blooding.

Doctors managed to save the Republican who was hospitalised for 12 days.

In a parallel to Trump, former President Theodore Roosevelt survived an attempt on his life while campaigning for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912.

Serving as vice president, he succeeded McKinley after his assassination but after two terms and a respite, he failed to get the Republican Party nomination and switched to the Progressive Party but lost the election.

Some Republican members of Congress had a narrow escape in 2017 after Trump’s election when a leftist attacked a group of them while they were practising for a baseball game.

Republican Whip in the House of Representatives Steve Scalise was injured.

In what is probably the most direct political violence in recent times, supporters of Trump attacked the Capitol as Congress was in the process of ratifying Biden’s election.

Four people died in the riot, though the only one was killed by a firearm was shot by law enforcement.

Gabby Gifford, a Democrat member of the House, survived an assassination attempt in 2011 at a meeting with her constituents outside a supermarket when a gunman opened fire killing six people, including a federal judge, and injuring 19.

Gifford suffered a brain injury that ended her political career.

The shooter had strong views against Gifford and had expressed the belief that women should not hold public offices.

Gifford had been a staunch proponent of gun control, an issue that sharply divides the nation.

Trump, who was injured in the assassination attempt, holds a position on gun control that has come to haunt him — but the near miss is unlikely to change his position.

The opposition to gun control accords with that of his Republican base that holds sacrosanct a broad literal interpretation of the Constitution’s Second Amendment that says, “Right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”.

The staunchest opponents of gun control in his base regulations are even against limitations on automatic and heavy-duty guns.

The gun laws mostly vary from state to state, with the Democratic-run states having the strictest laws.

But even they cannot keep gun violence and the possession of weapons under control as domestic gun runners transport and sell guns from states with lax controls to strict ones.

One of the concessions that Trump had made was to curtail guns with bump stocks, an adapter that can make certain guns act like automatic weapons.

The law prompted by the killing of 60 people at a Las Vegas concert, was recently struck down by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

Amid the harsh and violent political rhetoric, death threats against politicians, judges, public figures, activists, and media personalities have almost become commonplace.

A man was arrested and charged last month with making death threats against Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran against Trump in the party primaries and dropped out to support the former president.

The Secret Service and other federal and state agencies investigate hundreds of threats.

Republicans sought to blame the rhetoric against Trump for the assassination attempt.

Senator JD Vance, considered one of those on Trump’s shortlist for vice president, posted on X, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination”.

Republicans seized on Biden telling his supporters recently after his debate fiasco, “We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”.

Nine Democratic Party members of the House of Representatives introduced a bill to strip Trump of Secret Service protection

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