Access to guns worsens the US political violence crisis, experts say

After the second apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump in two months, gun safety advocates say the episode underlines the perilous political landscape of potentially lethal violence against public officials in a nation where firearms outnumber people.

A 58-year-old man, identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, was apprehended by authorities on Sunday after Secret Service agents spotted the barrel of a rifle peeking through foliage at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the former president was playing golf. Routh appeared in federal court in Florida on Monday and was charged with federal gun crimes.

The incident came two months after a shooter opened fire at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee, seriously injuring two others and grazing the ear of the former president.

“We live in dangerous times,” a Secret Service spokesperson said of the attack.

As research shows an increase in Americans’ support for political violence, leaders of gun safety groups specifically blamed the proliferation of firearms for how deadly such events can become.

“Political violence does not represent the values of America and has no place in our democracy. But, yet again, a person armed with hate and an assault weapon attempted to take the former president’s life,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “There is no room for violence of any kind in our country and we must keep firearms out of the hands of people hellbent on tearing apart our political process and our communities.”

Giffords, the group founded by the former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords after she survived an assassination attempt in 2011, echoed that sentiment, saying on X: “We’re relieved that former President Trump is safe after the FBI reported an apparent assassination attempt in Florida. Gun violence has no place in America. Weak laws make all of us less safe.”

The group Brady: United Against Gun Violence similarly called on the nation to “come together to condemn political violence and address America’s gun violence crisis”.

Kamala Harris, in an interview on Tuesday with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, again denounced what the authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt against her Republican opponent.

“I am in this election and this race for many reasons, including to fight for our democracy,” she said, “and in a democracy, there is no place for political violence.”

Earlier in the interview, she reiterated her support for an assault weapons ban and other policy interventions aimed at reducing gun violence.

Experts say the rising tide of political violence is hardly unique to the US, but it is exceptionally deadly here.

“There’s a myth that Americans are a uniquely violent people, and we’re not,” saidGaren Wintemute, head of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis who has studied the association between firearm ownership and political violence for years. “What we have here is a uniquely high rate of fatal assaultive violence, and that’s because we have a unique level of access to firearms, which changes the outcome.”

According to research conducted by his team, Americans who had bought guns since the disruptions of the Covid pandemic in 2020 or who regularly carry loaded firearms in public expressed higher levels of susceptibility to political violence. A similar but less marked trend was found among owners of assault-style rifles, like the kind often used in mass shootings and in the Pennsylvania attempt on Trump’s life.

“There are, on any given day in the United States, thousands of armed people walking the streets who support the idea of political violence and are willing to engage in it,” Wintemute said.

With fewer than 50 days before the election, experts fear the recent threats to Trump’s life could fuel future acts of violence. But it doesn’t have to, said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies political violence.

When violence is legitimized as a political tool, she said, it risks spiraling out of control, unleashing a threat that looms over public officials of every ideology and at every level, from presidential candidates to lower level judges and election officials.

But if leaders across the political spectrum – including Trump, whose own increasingly menacing rhetoric has contributed to a toxic public atmosphere – forcefully denounced the violence and urged Americans to resolve their differences peacefully, research suggests it could help stem the tide.

“The normalization of violence begets more violence,” Kleinfeld said. “Unfortunately, no one has normalized violence more than Trump and the Maga faction, but that is no excuse for it to be used against him. He does, however, have the greatest power to stop this.”

As a presidential candidate, Trump continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him – a lie that led his supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6 in a violent attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. He has threatened to jail his political enemies and warned of the possibility of a “bloodbath” should he lose the election.

He also has history of attacking the judges and prosecutors overseeing the multiple criminal cases against him, leading to calls for their execution among some of his supporters. Concerns for the judges’ safety prompted an increase in security for Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing the election interference case against Trump.

This week, bomb threats have forced evacuations and lockdowns of schools, the city hall and other government facilities in Springfield, Ohio, after Trump and other Republican politicians repeated the racist and false conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants there were kidnapping and eating pets.

“Followers absolutely hear him. You can see it in the call and response violence that he’s unleashed against judges and witnesses and juries,” she said. “So he is very much able to tell his own followers this has to stop.”

Federal investigators are still searching for clues about the gunman’s motivations. In the hours after the gun incident in Florida, Trump claimed without evidence that “inflammatory language” from Democrats had inspired what authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt against him.

“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country – both from the inside and out,” Trump said in comments to Fox News Digital.

He continued, saying the president and vice-president “want to destroy our country”.

“It is called the enemy from within,” he said. “They are the real threat.”

JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, also blamed Democratic rhetoric and said the attempts on the former president’s life were “pretty strong evidence” that the left “needs to cut this crap out”.

“I’d say the most important difference is that people on your team tried to kill Donald Trump twice,” Vance asserted, in a tweet responding to a post by David Frum, a conservative columnist who has been critical of Trump.

Biden offered a sharp contrast with his predecessor, in remarks at a conference for historically Black colleges and universities in Philadelphia on Monday afternoon.

“America has suffered too many times the tragedy of an assassin’s bullet,” Biden said. “It solves nothing. It just tears the country apart. We must do everything we can to prevent it and never give it any oxygen.”

Wintemute said his team had just received fresh data as part of its multi-year survey assessing Americans’ attitudes toward political violence. It showed that Americans’ support and acceptance of political violence had remained unchanged since 2023, a finding Wintemute called “good news” given the tumult of an election year.

In another positive sign, just 5% of Americans said they were very or extremely likely to participate as a combatant if large-scale conflict broke out. Among this small minority, nearly half said they would be open to changing their minds if encouraged to do so by a family member, and a quarter said they would listen to friends.

Within the findings was a call to action, not just for public officials but for all Americans. Everyone has a role to play in de-escalating violence, Wintemute said.

“There really is no such thing as spectators at a train wreck,” he said. “If we have large-scale political violence in this country, we’re all on the train and we’re all going over the cliff together.”