Trump Shooting and the United States of Violence

Trump Shooting and the United States of Violence

Last Saturday afternoon, my wife’s mom called us up.  

She’s 99 years old, and she’s lived through a lot of bad stuff, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.   She remembers a lot of other bad stuff.  She remembers what she was doing when John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated.  She even remembers when someone tried to assassinate Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and Gerald Ford (twice) and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

She was calling us up because she knew what bad stuff, really bad stuff, was like, and she wanted to tell us that someone had tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. 

I don’t know if she’s a Trump supporter or not.  She doesn’t like to talk about politics and presidents and their policies.  She feels that that kind of stuff should remain private.  Talking about it, especially when you’re talking about it with people who may disagree with you, she feels is just something that is best avoided.

She was calling to tell us about the shooting, not to talk about whether she will vote for Biden or vote for Trump.

She knew that a bad, bad thing had happened and that, if we didn’t know it had happened, we would want to know.

She was right.

My wife Linda and I had seen a lot of bad things happen in America too, and we wanted to know about this one.  We turned on the news and started watching.

The shooting itself didn’t surprise me.  On March 23, 2024, I wrote a column for the Dziennik Związkowy entitled “Bloodbath” about the rhetoric of violence in this election.  The column began by talking about something Trump said at a rally in Ohio: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” 

That quote and similar violent quotes from Trump over the years suggest to me that he understands America, understands America probably better than Joe Biden.

After the attempt to assassinate Trump, Joe Biden appeared on TV and made a statement. He said, “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick.”

The statement from Biden suggests that he doesn’t understand what America is.  My wife’s 99 year-old mother seems to understand America better.  If you ask her, she’ll tell you that the United States is a land of violence.  

I started this column talking about the violence aimed at political figures here in the United States, but the violence, of course, doesn’t stop there.

According to a 2022 study, 7 of the 50 most violent cities in the world with the highest number of homicides are in the United States: New Orleans, Baltimore, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.

And the violence goes on.  In 2023, there were 346 school shootings in the US, the highest number since 1966.  That same year 43,163 people died in the US from gun-related injuries. And according to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 290 mass shootings have occurred in the US so far this year in the US.  More than 300 people have died in these mass shootings and 1,275 people have been injured.  

Yes, Biden is right.  The violence here is “sick.” In fact, I would say that there’s a plague of violence here, and it’s been here for a long time, and it just seems to be getting worse and worse.

How are we going to stop it?  

Biden can’t tell you, and neither can Trump.  No president can stop this violence.

As my wife’s mother likes to say, America is the United States of Violence.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

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