Like school shootings, political violence is becoming almost routine
'Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,' the president said.
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And yet the expanding club of survivors of political violence seemed to stand as evidence to the contrary.
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In the past three months alone, a man set fire to the Pennsylvania governor's residence while Shapiro and his family were asleep inside; another man gunned down a pair of workers from the Israeli Embassy outside an event in Washington; protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colo., were set on fire; and the Republican Party headquarters in New Mexico and a Tesla dealership near Albuquerque were firebombed.
And those were just the incidents that resulted in death or destruction.
Against that backdrop, it might have been shocking, but it was not really so surprising, when Saturday morning, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their home, and a Democratic state senator, John A. Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, were shot and wounded.
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Slowly but surely, political violence has moved from the fringes to an inescapable reality. Violent threats and even assassinations, attempted or successful, have become part of the political landscape — a steady undercurrent of American life.
For months now, Representative Greg Landsman, Democrat of Ohio, has been haunted by the thought that he could be shot and killed. Every time he campaigns at a crowded event, he said, he imagines himself bleeding on the ground.
'It's still in my head. I don't think it will go away,' he said of the nightmarish vision. 'It's just me on the ground.'
The image underscores a duality of political violence in America today. Like school shootings, it is both sickening and becoming almost routine, another fact of living in an anxious and dangerously polarized country.
Trump was the victim of two assassination attempts during his campaign last year, during a speech in Butler, Pa., when a bullet grazed his ear, and two weeks later in Florida, when a man stalked him with a semiautomatic rifle from outside his golf course.
Violent threats against lawmakers hit a record high last year, for the second year in a row. Since the 2020 election, state and local election officials have become targets of violent threats and harassment, as have federal judges, prosecutors and other court officials. As of April, there have been more than 170 incidents of threats and harassment targeting local officials across nearly 40 states this year, according to data gathered for the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University.
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Even in the stretches between acts of actual violence, the air has been thick with violent and menacing political rhetoric.
Over the past five days — in which a senator was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed for trying to ask a question of a Cabinet secretary at a news conference — a governor was threatened with arrest by the president and with being 'tarred and feathered' by the speaker of the House.
And as tanks prepared to roll down Constitution Avenue in Washington in a political display of firepower, the president warned that any protesters there would be met with 'heavy force.'
The response to the Minnesota shootings Saturday followed a familiar pattern. Leaders in both parties issued statements condemning the latest incident and offering the victims their prayers. Then came calls for additional security.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, the minority leader, warned against merely denouncing the shootings and moving on. 'Condemning violence while ignoring what fuels it is not enough,' he said. 'We must do more to protect one another, our democracy and the values that bind us as Americans.'
Schumer requested additional security for Democratic Minnesota Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith as he had earlier in the week for Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, after Padilla was manhandled and briefly cuffed when he tried to ask a question of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And Schumer asked the Senate sergeant-at-arms and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, to convene a full briefing on the security of members of the Senate.
Klobuchar laid blame for the violence with growing partisanship and disinformation online. Klobuchar, who was a close friend of Melissa Hortman, the slain former Minnesota House speaker, urged politicians to reevaluate their own rhetoric.
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'People have just gotten angry and angrier, and they have started to act out what they read online,' Klobuchar said. 'At some point, you got to look in the mirror, when you look at what's going on here — every single elected official does.'
Political violence has been part of the American story since the founding of the country, often erupting in periods of great change. Four presidents have been killed in office, and another was shot and seriously wounded. Members of Congress have been involved in dozens of brawls, duels, and other violent incidents over the centuries.
Today, while most Americans do not support political violence, a growing share have said in surveys that they view rival partisans as a threat to the country or even as inhuman.
Trump has had a hand in that. Since his 2016 candidacy, he has signaled at least his tacit approval of violence against his political opponents. He encouraged attendees at his rallies to 'knock the hell' out of protesters, praised a lawmaker who body-slammed a reporter and defended the rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, who clamored to 'hang Mike Pence.' One of his first acts in his second term as president was to pardon those rioters.
On a day when 'No Kings' protests against the Trump administration were taking place across the country, the shooting's impact already extended into the political realm in practical ways. In Minnesota, where a search was underway for the shooter, law enforcement officials urged people to avoid the protests 'out of an abundance of caution.'
And in Austin, Texas, the state police shuttered the state Capitol and surrounding grounds after receiving a credible threat against lawmakers planning to attend protests there Saturday evening.
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'One of the goals of political violence is to silence opposition,' said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies violence and political partisanship. 'It's not just the act against a few people or victims. The idea is that you want to silence more people than you physically harm.'
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