By Brigitte L. Nacos
Whether one likes or dislikes Donald J. Trump, the news of a possible second assassination attempt against the former and perhaps future U.S. president was another shocking indication that violence and the threat thereof by perpetrators armed with military style attack weapons have become as American as apple pie.
While deadly shootings occur typically in schools, shopping malls, movie theaters, streets, and other public places killing and injuring members of the general public, political violence, too, has increased in the last decade. Serious threats against presidents, members of congress, poll workers, and other public officials have skyrocketed.
Thus, the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and now the second reported effort to shoot the former president on his Florida golf course should not have come as surprises. Because Second Amendment fanatics in Congress continue to refuse outlawing the most lethal assault weapons, no other western population is as dangerously armed as Americans. When mass shootings or assassination attempts on politicians take place, the gun-lobby and its servants in Congress are always quick to argue that this is not the time to discuss and do something about the weapons issue.
After Trump suffered a superficial wound on one of his ears, when shot at during his campaign rally in Butler, he seemed shaken enough to suspend his language of hate and division for a short time. Once back to normal, he suggested implicitly that his political opponents, “they,” had something to do with the attack.
Yesterday, the blame game began a few hours after the alleged assassination attempt, when Trump said in an interview with FOX News Digital,
The would-be gunman “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it. 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.”
This accusation was not backed by facts. And he told another lie in the Fox interview, when he insisted that he does not use inflammatory language to describe his political opponents.
Of course, he does--on a daily basis. At one campaign stop, he said what he repeated elsewhere,
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections…They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
Not inflammatory?
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