The Trump assassination attempt: No evidence the shooter was on a political mission

I don’t suppose J.D. Vance or any of the other MAGA Republicans who accused President Biden of inciting violence against Trump will apologize. So far, according to published reports, federal investigators have found no evidence that the 20-year-old man/boy who tried to kill Trump was driven by political ideology. So far, the only thing that qualifies the Butler, Pa. shooting as an act of “political violence” was the intended victim — the former president who is a candidate to be president again. But, of course, Vance and other Republican loudmouths immediately assumed the shooter was driven to act by the political left’s attacks on Trump, their warnings that he’s a danger to democracy. But there’s no evidence the 20-year-old wanted to do anything but make a name for himself. (You won’t find his name here.)

So, while acknowledging the political nature of this event — the attempted assassination of a politician at a campaign event — my inclination is to list the Butler shooting along with all the other mindless, senseless shootings that occurred each day in a country infested with guns, bigotry and untreated mental illness. Barely making news the same day of the Butler shooting: Four people dead and ten wounded in a mass shooting at an event in Birmingham, Alabama.

“Since the mass shooting in Butler, there have already been at least ten additional mass shootings in America, two of which took place the same day that former President Trump was targeted,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, at Monday’s hearing on Secret Service lapses at Butler. “One of the mass shootings on that violent Saturday, July 13th, happened at 11 p.m. at a nightclub in Birmingham, Alabama, where four people were shot dead and ten others wounded. This means, amazingly, that the Butler attack was not even the deadliest mass shooting to happen in America on that day.”

Going back to the 1960s, when assassins killed President Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, there were guns and there were homicides — but not on the scale we see now, and mass shootings were rare. The Virginia Center for Public Safety said that, since JFK was assassinated in 1963, more Americans have died by gunfire within our own country than American servicemen and women were killed in all our wars. That was true — and that was eight years ago.

The irony in all this: Republicans screaming about Biden’s “bullseye” comment and about the lapses in security at Butler oppose all efforts to curtail gun violence by restricting who gets guns, what types of guns they can get, where they can carry them and how they can use them — all in the cause of protecting a gun industry that reaps profit from American blood. And they have a Supreme Court to back them up. Had Trump been killed, it would not have made a difference. We are stuck with this way of life, this gun culture — the new normal that has quickly become the old new normal.