The bullets fly

“There’s no place for this kind of violence in America.”

So said President Joe Biden in response to an attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump on Saturday, in a shooting at a campaign rally that left an attendee dead and two others severely injured. The shooter was taken out by a Secret Service counter-sniper team.

It was, of course, the right thing — the only thing — to say.

But violence directed at political figures has all too often found its place in America — and across the world. Sometimes it is politically or ideologically motivated, as when Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 and touched off the fuse that exploded the European powder keg cataclysmically in World War I. Often, it’s the acting out of the pathologies of the maladjusted, as when John Hinckley, Jr., wounded President Ronald Reagan and several others in a 1981 shooting motivated by his desire to impress a movie actress with whom he had no relationship whatsoever.

We don’t know yet what was the motivation of the 20-year-old shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, whether he was a Princip or a Hinckley.

It is right to insist that political violence should have no place in America — but it’s also necessary to recognize that over more than two centuries political violence has seeped into the fabric of the nation like an indelible blood stain. We remember that four presidents have been killed in office: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. But there have been many other attempts, now seldom remembered.

Andrew Jackson narrowly escaped death when an assassin stuck a percussion pistol in his chest and pulled the trigger. The percussion cap fired, but the main charge did not go off. Gerald Ford was targeted twice in 17 days, by two separate women. Manson follower Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme failed to chamber a round in her Colt 1911. Sara Jane Moore actually got shots off from a .38 revolver, and missed.

Theodore Roosevelt took a .38 slug in the chest while campaigning to regain the office of president, and delivered an 84-minute speech before receiving treatment. An Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 while Roosevelt was giving a speech from the back of his car. He didn’t hit him, but he did hit and mortally wound Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

Huey Long, who was a populist rival of Roosevelt’s in the 1930s, was gunned down in the Louisiana State House.

Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. both fell in the terrible year of 1968.

In the very recent past, Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband was assaulted in his home by a maniac hunting for her. In 2022, a 26-year-old man traveled to the Maryland home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with burglary tools, a Glock, and a plan to kill the justice, then commit suicide.

The list is long — and it’s not exclusively American. Europe endured a deadly spate of political assassinations through the late 19th century, right up to the murder in Sarajevo that inaugurated an apocalypse.

Open societies — where people, parties, and ideologies contend for power — breed rancor. And there is always going to be a handful of people angry enough or demented enough to act out the most extreme manifestation of that rancor. We have to recognize — even if we can’t allow ourselves to acquiesce to it — that this is what we are.

You could argue that it is only improvements in surveillance and security that have made active targeting of political figures uncommon. And we all saw the results of the breakdown of security at the Trump rally.

A friend here in Sisters expressed the hope last weekend that the horrifying events in Pennsylvania on Saturday will sober up a country that has grown increasingly addicted to vitriol and hyperbolic rhetoric that feeds a climate of rage and distrust. I hope he’s right, but I have my doubts. I can’t help but remember that the president who eloquently appealed to “the better angels of our nature” as civil war loomed over the country fell to an assassin’s bullet just as that war was ending.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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