A Meditation on Political Violence

Gun Barrels & Human Perils

Tons o’ guns, everybody’s getting strapped
Tons o’ guns, gotta watch the way you act
Tons o’ guns, real easy to get
Tons o’ guns, bringing nothing but death
—Gang Starr, 1994

Just a few days on from the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, I am certain the media has already done a thorough job of turning over nearly every stone and going down almost every potential offshoot connected to the event. As such, I don’t have much to add in this regard.

However, I do wish to weigh in on a particular component of the coverage that has ensued. Specifically, the predictable, and in some sense, useful denunciation of political violence.

On the one hand, I get it, any regularization of assassination and other violent means to effectuate political outcomes is a foreboding development that almost necessarily ends in a law-like descent into some variant of authoritarianism.

On the other hand, as I read through these ostensibly noble calls from Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, et al., I found myself mystified by the self-conjured delusions needed to both proclaim and genuinely believe (which I think they do) in these utterances.

Starting with the most apparent contradictions first, we need only to think about the ready use of political violence by Clinton, Bush II, and Obama to achieve their aims. One needs only to peruse their records of foreign aggression, the momentous death toll, and the failure to achieve any discernable ‘accomplishment.’

Undoubtedly, many will say, but that is ‘foreign policy’ and thus a different domain of action outside what these calls against political violence are meant to cover. Perhaps, but regardless, they constitute an unequivocal employment of extremely violent means to achieve political goals. So it seems much more honest for the calls to say that we condemn some types of political violence but remain committed to the regular and robust use of political violence to attain goals elsewhere in the world.

In terms of the ethical standing of these exercises of political violence, one cannot help but be reminded of this memorable passage from Pascal’s Pensées:

Why do you kill me? What! do you not live on the other side of the water? If you lived on this side, my friend, I should be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this manner. But since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just…Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth.

To be sure, to the extent that we are constantly reminded that America’s wars are essential to preserving our freedom and way of life, it seems that political violence is not antithetical to US democracy but a necessary condition for its preservation.

However, though certainly important, this is not the central angle of approach I wish to pursue in this exploration of political violence in the US. Rather, I think the tumult around these undeniably momentous events of July 13 provides the opportunity to step back and consider this term and the experience of American life.

Indeed, sad as it may be to say, people being gunned down by a random shooter is hardly a novel occurrence in the land of the free. But of course, what we are zeroing in on here is that this was a mass shooting event where the target was a prominent political figure. Hence, in this case, it seems that appending the operative qualifier ‘political’ to this instance of ‘violence’ is an appropriate way to categorize it and signify its elevated import.

Certainly, I am not trying to counter the characterization of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life (along with the shooting of two other bystanders and the murder of Corey Comperatore) as political violence. Nor am I claiming that it is not a matter of great significance.

However, what I think bears considering is the way such a laser focus on this term, in this instance, works to implicitly depoliticize the countless Americans who have died in mass shootings over the past several decades.

Perhaps the most insidious manifestation of this unique cultural motif is the phenomenon of active shooters when a disturbed, often aggrieved individual sets upon a gathering and begins to open fire, killing at random. As the data collected by Pew demonstrates, these incidences have been on the rise over the last several decades—with the average jumping from 6.4/year for the five years 2000-2004 to 38.4/year 2017-2021.

In the wake of such events, there is an inevitable, perhaps understandable, but simultaneously ghoulish desire to ascertain the specific motive or motivations. If the perpetrator had some political leanings or affiliations, then it may be placed in some category of ‘politically motivated’ violence.

Often, the focus correctly turns to the failure to produce any meaningful state action to even try to curtail such tragedies. So, in this vein, even if there was no ‘political motive,’ the discourse does indeed turn to politics and the government’s failure to ameliorate these conditions.

However, what I am trying to get at here is that to me, those killings are political violence of the same stripe that descended upon Western Pennsylvania on July 13. Of course, the primary target was a person of great political significance, being a former and (at least at present) likely future president. But if you accept, as I do, that at a fundamental level, no life is more valuable than another, we can begin to understand that all of these ‘active shooter’ events constituted political violence.

To better get this, we can home in on the horrific, yet distinctive, American phenomenon of the school shooting. Again, at times, there may be some obtuse political ideology behind these acts of shocking barbarity. But more often than not, they are rendered all the more incomprehensible by the seeming lack of purpose other than to murder a lot of kids.

But as I have been arguing throughout, to not frame this as political violence represents a mode of distillation and categorization that is itself highly political. In sum, to be asked to enter spaces daily that one has to contemplate as a potential (if unlikely) site of carnage and massacre is to be thrust into a world of danger. Indeed, for children under laws demanding compulsory education (which is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself), this amounts to a situation whereby one is compelled to enter these zones of foreboding menace.

From this perspective, the children and the school staff are implicitly conscripted into occupy these spaces amidst a wider society that seems unwilling or unable to mitigate these threats. Certainly, I can imagine objections at this juncture pointing out that this is simply overwrought, sensationalist framing. Indeed, the vast, vast proportion of kids heading to school tomorrow, the day after that, and so on will not be a victim of nor even experience a school massacre.

True as that may be, it is important to keep in mind that it is the nature of political violence to cascade far beyond those immediately harmed. Further, the dispersion of effects across an entire society is extremely political in nature. This goes beyond the already alluded to failures of governance to the actual experiences of (in this example) the millions of individual students and staff at schools.

To be a 13-year-old who has to, as a matter of course, even entertain the notion that one day a person may enter the school and open fire with a high-capacity assault rifle is to live under a persistent specter of menace that is that hallmark of political violence. At this point, thousands of US citizens have experienced these shoot-ups directly, and millions who must participate in active shooter drills, and millions more who must walk through metal detectors every day just to enter the classroom. This is a state of being defined by political violence.

As we all saw a few days back, when the target of an active shooter violence is an important figure like Mr. Trump, there are dozens of highly trained, dedicated individuals standing at the ready to form a literal human shield around their charge.

I don’t necessarily begrudge Mr. Trump or any other ‘protected’ individual this sacrificial deference per se. At the same time, I must say that upon seeing that image of a circular phalanx of bodies formed to absorb a bullet aimed at another, I thought about those children, teachers, and staff out on the frontlines of our school shoot-up society.

They are loyal public servants and everyday kids trying to make their way in a messy world. Nonetheless, they carry with them the thought that on any given day, they may be called upon to be a body to shield other bodies. Indeed, I can imagine many teachers have had to think about these very moments and consider it a duty to perform such a sacrificial act themselves. Again, the very state of having to even contemplate this situation is unambiguously violent, and political.

Why we are seemingly so committed to such a narrow definition of political violence, I cannot say for sure, but one explanation is that it deflects the need to confront the depths to which the ever-present menace of violence contorts our lives. Whether willing or not, we are day by day conscripted into a domain of violence and forced to navigate it emotionally and physically. All without a cadre of protectors surrounding us and perched on nearby rooftops.

That divide itself is political. That this is a persistent menace that one must confront regardless of their willingness is political. As such, to winnow down our conception of political violence only to attacks on specific members of the elect is to imply a hierarchy of human value.

When speaking about the recent assassination of President Kennedy, Malcolm X described it as a case of ‘the chickens coming home to roost.’ Indeed, it would be this very statement that would put him on a collision course with the Nation of Islam that resulted in his own assassination.

Perhaps that was an inartful thing to say amidst the national state of mourning over Kennedy’s death. However, I also feel that as he did in so many other profound ways, Malcolm X was willing to put honesty and integrity ahead of his own personal expediency.

I mention this because, for all we can tell now, the shooter had no abiding ideology or grandiose vision of changing history. Rather, he seems to have been an isolated, perhaps depressed, and disillusioned 20-year-old. One that had ample access to a rifle capable of taking a sniper-style shot from roughly five hundred feet away. In this way, he seems much more akin to the school and other ‘active shooters’ that have defined American life in important ways over the last few decades.

Given Mr. Trump’s robust advocacy to ensure that that young man was able to get his hands on such a rifle, it does strike one as an instance of ‘the chickens coming home to roost.’ I say this not to imply that Mr. Trump deserved to be shot because he actively enables the flow of sniper rifles into society; flatly, I don’t think he deserved to be shot and I am glad he survived. But at the same time, the notion that this is a ‘sensitive’ time should not prevent us from noting that indirectly Mr. Trump was, in-part, the author of his own brush with death.

Of course, we have yet to even delve into the long-standing employment of state and civilian-based political violence against non-White peoples, particularly Black and Native Americans. One can also think of the horrors of the Japanese internment as yet another case among the many. Alas, these instances are rarely branded with the moniker, political violence, though, of course, they most certainly are. To this, we can add all of the non-active-shooter instances of gun violence that have transformed communities, and the lives millions of individuals lead.

To the extent that this brief and not fully formed meditation has advanced a core point, it is this: making such sharp and narrow distinctions regarding what constitutes political violence is itself a political maneuver. And it is a distinction that has important consequences for how we understand, process, and resist the political experience of living amid ever-present violent potentialities.

Note: Post image generated using Bing’s AI services.