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    Ryan Routh found guilty of 2024 attempted assassination of Trump in Florida

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    The man accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump on his West Palm Beach golf course two months before Trump clinched his second presidency in the 2024 White House election has been found guilty by a jury in Fort Pierce, Florida.Ryan Routh – who now faces up to life in prison at a later sentencing hearing – reportedly tried to use a pen to stab himself in the neck as the guilty verdict was read in court. Officers quickly swarmed him and dragged him out of the courthouse.Jurors in Routh’s trial returned a verdict of guilty on all charges after deliberating for less than three hours.The government charged Routh, 59, with five criminal counts, including attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate, possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence and assaulting a Secret Service agent, after an incident on 15 September last year when he was spotted with a rifle hiding in bushes as Trump’s golfing party approached.Prosecutors said Routh, 59, had purchased a military-grade weapon, researched Trump’s movements and utilized a dozen burner phones as part of a plot to kill Trump that was motivated by political grievances.“Today’s guilty verdict against would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh illustrates the Department of Justice’s commitment to punishing those who engage in political violence,” US attorney general Pam Bondi said in a statement on X.“This attempted assassination was not only an attack on our [now] president, but an affront to our very nation itself,” Bondi added before thanking prosecutors and law enforcement for “protecting” Trump and “securing this important verdict”.In a post on Truth Social, Trump thanked the attorney general, deputy Todd Blanche, and the justice department team for Routh’s conviction, calling it “meticulously handled”. He also thanked “the Judge and Jury for their time, professionalism, and patience”, adding:“This was an evil man with an evil intention, and they caught him. I would also like to thank the Secret Service, Department of Florida Law Enforcement, and the wonderful person who spotted him running from the site of the crime, and acted by following him, and getting all information on car type and license plate to the Sheriff’s Office, IMMEDIATELY, which led to his arrest and conviction.“What incredible instinct and foresight this person had – A very big moment for JUSTICE IN AMERICA!”Routh’s attempt on Trump’s life on 15 September 2024 came just nine weeks after the then presidential candidate narrowly survived a previous attempted assassination at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the earlier case, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks fired eight shots at Trump, with one bullet grazing his ear, before being killed by Secret Service counter-snipers, officials have said.At the trial, Routh represented himself despite having no legal expertise. In court filings, he suggested his case should be settled by a golf match.If Trump won, the president could execute Routh, the filing suggested. If Routh won, he said, he would become president.Routh also requested a putting green for match practice and asked for “female strippers” to be present.His self-representation intermittently threatened to derail proceedings. The presiding judge, Aileen Cannon – who dismissed an unrelated case against Trump involving federal classified documents – advised Routh to keep his comments relevant after he remarked that “modern trials seem to eliminate all that is human”. But Routh continued his musings on the “history” of human existence.Routh was once a North Carolina construction worker who had moved to Hawaii and styled himself as a mercenary leader. He tried to recruit soldiers from Afghanistan, Moldova and Taiwan to fight the Russians in Ukraine.Prosecutors said Routh made 17 trips to scope out Trump’s golf course. Over the course of his two-week trial, prosecutors called 38 witnesses, including two bothers who testified about receiving a box from Routh five months earlier that contained wires, pipes and bullets.After investigators arrested Routh, the brothers said they opened the box to find a 12-page letter in which he wrote: “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job.”Routh ultimately was spotted by a Secret Service agent as he hid in nearby shrubbery while aiming a rifle at a member of Trump’s security detail. An agent fired on Routh, who initially fled the scene but was later captured driving north.Police later said the perimeter of the golf course was not fully secured as Trump was not an incumbent president and his visit was not scheduled. Routh was captured after a tipoff from a witness who had made a record of a license plate number of a car into which a man had jumped into after running out of the bushes.Routh chose not to testify in his own defense but instead called three witness, two of whom testified about his character. He told the court that he hoped they would show jurors he was incapable of killing Trump, who retook the Oval Office in January.“Give it your worst,” Routh told Cannon after she warned him about using character witnesses. “We can analyze every moment of my life. We are here to ascertain the truth – we are going to give the jury everything.”He called Marshall Hinshaw, a longtime friend, asking him if his “personal opinion” of Routh was that he was “peaceful and gentle, and nonviolent?”“I would say so,” Hinshaw said. “I would not expect you to harm anyone, Ryan.”Routh asked Hinshaw about his parenting style. “You are not aware of me hitting or spanking my children?” Routh asked.“No, maybe the other way around,” Hinshaw said. As the questioning continued, Cannon said: “This must cease. I am going to ask you to wrap up.” She later warned that she would bar Routh from addressing the jury if his closing argument was “disconnected”.Routh also called Michael McClay, a US Marine Corps veteran and expert in sniper tactics. McClay noted that Routh’s rifle – a Chinese-made variant of the AK-47 – would routinely misfire and that its scope appeared to be attached with putty, tape and glue.“Is there any way you could put a chance of success rate?” Routh asked McClay. McClay replied: “With the severity and seriousness of this, I am not going to guess that.”“I respect that,” Routh said.Routh’s line of questioning went further astray when he asked McClay, “If someone is not dedicated to their mission 100%, is an exit plan vital to those who are cowards?”McClay answered: “I don’t understand.” More

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      Trump should be reassuring the country at this time. Instead he is sowing fear

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      The public response to the killing of Charlie Kirk in cold blood, has revealed how drastically our democracy – our belief in the importance of free speech and in the irreplaceable life of each and every individual – has deteriorated over the last half century.I was a senior in high school when John F Kennedy was assassinated, and a senior in college when Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed. Plenty of conspiracy theories, some of which have never been put to rest, were floated and debated. But the difference between what happened then and what we are seeing now is that, in the aftermath of those violent deaths, there was a sense of shared grief, of national mourning. Those tragedies seemed to bring us, as a country, closer together in our shock and sorrow.Obviously, tha is quite unlike what is occurring today, when the president has publicly declared that he “couldn’t care less” about healing the divisions plaguing and weakening our society. The instinctive and widespread response to Kirk’s death has been to demonize and blame a perceived enemy. Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and their minions were quick to accuse the “lunatic radical left”.Despite the emerging evidence, they seem unwilling to amend their version of what happened. I will admit that, on hearing the news, my first thought was that the Maga movement had orchestrated the killing to distract us from the Epstein files, or that this was the modern-day equivalent of the 1933 Reichstag fire, which occurred when the German parliament building was torched, and the National Socialists blamed the communists, and used the event as a pretext for suspending civil liberties and installing an authoritarian regime.The motives of the suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, are still unclear. But it appears that both the right and the left both had it wrong to some degree. Robinson was a studious young man from a solidly Republican, Mormon family, used anti-fascist slogans and apparently disliked Kirk for his hateful views.Regardless of what we thought of Kirk, it is profoundly and dangerously immoral to sanction political violence, regardless of its object. It is unseemly to celebrate the shooting of a human being with a wife and children – even a man whose rhetoric we may have despised.In another country, in another era, the death of Kirk might have served to remind us of the essential importance of free speech, of the concept that even the most polarizing figures should be able to speak publicly without fear of violent retribution. In drafting the first amendment, the founding fathers affirmed the idea that even racists, misogynists and anti-immigrant bigots have the right to express their beliefs and to engage in a free and fair debate with those who hold very different views. In fact, it’s the essence of democracy, the cornerstone on which our nation was founded and that every patriot (however that word is construed now) should affirm.Instead, Kirk’s death has been weaponized as a pretext to further undermine first amendment protections, to circle the wagons around the worst aspects of censorship and blind obedience to authority. It is being employed to foster the fear of saying anything that runs contrary to what those in power believe and allow us to express. Already, teachers, soldiers, government officials, firefighters and reporters – most prominently, MSNBC news analyst Matthew Dowd – have been censured or lost their jobs after saying in public or on social media that Kirk’s rhetoric was a form of not-so-thinly-disguised hate speech.There has been some pushback, among the public and on the floor of Congress, against the directive that prayers should be said and flags lowered to half mast in Kirk’s memory. Personally, I’m fine with the idea of prayers and lowered flags, except that I think that these gestures of mourning, honor and respect are being deployed too selectively.The flags should have been lowered for, among others, another recent victim of political violence: Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, who was murdered, along with her husband, Mark, in June. Prayers should be said for the Colorado high school students wounded in one of the latest school shootings, on the very same day as Charlie Kirk’s murder. Flags should be lowered and prayers said for every victim lost to senseless gun violence, until we are tired of all the praying and flag-lowering, until we decide, as a nation, to take action to prevent these tragic deaths.My great fear is that we are nearing the day when, if we are being honest, the flag should be lowered in memory of our fragile, flawed, precious democracy. In that case, we may have to wait a while to see it flying proudly and at full mast, once again.

      Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences More

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      Chicago organizers say city needs support, not politicalization by Trump: ‘This is not a serious solution’

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      For months, Donald Trump and his administration have been using violent crime as a justification for ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) operations and sending or threatening to send the national guard to blue cities – first in Los Angeles, then Washington DC and, last week, Chicago.But for those who work on the ground to prevent crime, the White House’s approaches will do little to address underlying causes. Instead, they say, increased law enforcement will only lead to harassment and increased surveillance in communities that are already overpoliced.“[Trump doesn’t] mean well for our community,” said Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, a non-profit that offers services for people most at risk of shooting someone or being shot. “Yes, there’s a lot of violence, and it’s because of policies over decades. If you want to go after violence, go to the cities and invest in them, not just send in the national guard.”Gross has worked in violence prevention for more than three decades. Over the years, he’s heard Chicagoans talk about the need for increased law enforcement in their neighborhoods, including deploying the national guard – comments he saw as expressions of understandable desperation. He says residents have grown exhausted from witnessing decades of bloodshed and poverty that go unabated under both Republican and Democratic administrations.Still, he said that these issues won’t be solved through the shows of force Trump is enacting. “We deal with grief daily. We see death daily. This is not a serious solution,” he said.Last year, 574 people were killed in Chicago, primarily from gunshot wounds, giving the city a homicide rate of 17 per 100,000 people. This is far below that of some cities in red states, such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Shreveport, Louisiana, whose rates were 59 and 41, respectively, that same year. Still, Chicago’s reputation for shootings is being exploited to normalize military force on city streets and expand law enforcement in neighborhoods that are already highly policed and surveilled, said Ethan Ucker, executive director of Stick Talk, a Chicago non-profit that approaches youth gun-carrying through a harm reduction lens.“Those narratives are strategically being deployed to justify state violence,” Ucker said. “I worry about increasing and accelerating criminalization. But that won’t stop when the national guard leaves. It’s ongoing.”The Rev Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, who leads Live Free Illinois, a coalition of faith-based organizations that advocate for criminal justice reform and public safety, said if Trump actually wants to help, he would emphasize better clearance rates and community-based support services for victims of crime, and would get gun trafficking under control.“We’ve advocated for more community-based resources to be invested in,” she said. “We’ve advocated to improve clearance rates. But to completely disregard those requests is immoral and not about protecting citizens.”Bates-Chamberlain, a native of Chicago’s South Side who’s worked in the violence prevention space for more than a decade, said that “two things can be true at the same time” when it comes to the current national conversation about crime in the US. While Chicago’s leadership is boasting a more than 30% decline in homicides in 2025 so far, there were still nearly 200 people killed in the city by the end of June and many more injured.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The numbers are down, yet communities are still feeling the impact,” she said.But the pain these losses and injuries carry and their reverberations throughout the community won’t be addressed by sending more law enforcement to the street, Bates-Chamberlain said.“He’s politicizing our pain and that is diabolical and despicable for the president of the United States to do,” she said. “This is really harmful.” More

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      Assassination in Utah, school shooting in Colorado: one day in US gun violence

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      At 12.23pm on Wednesday, as the rightwing influencer and provocateur Charlie Kirk was addressing a large crowd at Utah Valley University, a single shot rang out. He was struck fatally by a bullet in the neck, sending thousands of screaming students scattering in all directions and propelling the country into a new and dangerous crisis.Exactly one minute later, at 12.24pm, about 450 miles to the east in Colorado, a 911 call came in to first responders in the mountain town of Evergreen. A 16-year-old student had opened fire with a revolver on high school grounds, critically injuring two fellow students before turning the handgun on himself.The confluence of two bloody incidents just one minute apart – the first taking the life of a key figure in Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, the second erupting in the same school district as the notorious 1999 Columbine massacre – underlined America’s dirty little non-secret: the ubiquitous, quotidian, nature of its gun violence.“Yesterday was a dark day in the United States,” the former Republican political strategist and Trump critic Steve Schmidt said on his podcast on Thursday. “It was a day of mass violence, of killing, of gun violence – in other words, in America it was a day like any other day.”The sense of shock that has ricocheted across the US since the Kirk shooting has been palpable. Cable news shows and social media feeds have been overflowing with intense browbeating and soul-searching about the parlous – and perilous – state of the nation.There have been umpteen calls to prayer, plenty of partisan name-calling, and even dark warnings about a coming civil war.What has been noticeable by its absence, though, is virtually any talk about the instrument that lies at the heart of America’s copious ongoing blood-letting: the gun.View image in fullscreen“America is an insanely violent nation,” said Hasan Piker, a progressive influencer who had been scheduled to debate with Kirk at a university in New Hampshire later this month. On his Twitch stream following the shooting, Piker lamented the lack of meaningful debate about reforming the country’s globally lax gun laws.“A bulletproof vest would not have saved Charlie Kirk. Security did not save Charlie Kirk. The only thing that could have potentially saved Charlie Kirk from getting shot in the neck was reasonable gun control.”Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of a book on the second amendment right to bear arms, Gunfight, told the Guardian that Americans had shown a stubborn resistance to gun safety reform through equally terrible shooting incidents in the past. They include horrors such as the killing of 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, and the mass murder of 60 people five years later at a music festival in Las Vegas.“People’s positions on the second amendment and gun policy have really hardened in recent years,” Winkler said. “It seems like Americans are impervious to shooting-based reforms, we’re just not seeing this. I don’t think this week’s tragedies are likely to shift the substance of the debate or the current stalemate on guns.”Kirk had been discussing gun violence at the moment that he was shot. Sitting on a sparkling cloudless day in the shade of a tent bearing the logo of his “American Comeback Tour”, the Turning Point USA leader was sparring by microphone with students over how many mass shooters in the past decade had been transgender.“Too many,” he said. (In fact, trans people have carried out a tiny fraction of mass shootings, the fact-checking group Politifact found.)Kirk’s own views on guns in America were reflective of the prevailing attitude across the Maga universe which is fiercely protective of the second amendment despite the evident side-effects of such devotion. Kirk being Kirk – his willingness to confront his detractors face to face was summed up in his slogan “Prove me wrong” – he articulated his passion for gun rights in brutally frank terms.In a speech in Salt Lake City two years ago that has been widely resurfaced on social media in the wake of his death, Kirk argued that the benefits of having guns in many American hands outweighed the costs. Gun deaths were inevitable in such a heavily armed society, he admitted, but the prevalence of firearms allowed citizens to “defend yourself against a tyrannical government”.“I think it’s worth it,” he said. “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It’s rational.”Kirk went on to repeat the mantra that the pro-gun National Rifle Association (NRA) touted in the wake of the Newtown tragedy – the solution to gun violence is more guns. “If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?”View image in fullscreenSuch a hardline pro-gun posture has been echoed by Trump. In the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, in the early stages of his first term in the White House, Trump backed raising the age of gun possession to 21, and even lent his name to comprehensive background checks which have long been a central demand of gun control advocates.It is not clear what made him change his mind – was it pressure from the NRA or from his own supporters? – but he quickly and quietly backed off the idea. The only change in gun policy in the second Trump administration has been in the direction of loosening regulations – his recent mega finance bill removed taxes from short-barrelled rifles and shotguns, and he has instructed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to aggressively roll back measures to reduce gun violence introduced by his predecessor, Joe Biden.In the immediate aftermath of the Kirk assassination, Trump has signaled that he will be guided not by a desire to get to the root of the problem but by a desire for vengeance. He has blamed the shooting on the “radical left”, disregarding recent atrocities against Democrats including the June shooting of Democratic Minnesota lawmakers in which one was killed.In a statement from the Oval Office, Trump has insinuated that he intends to crack down on leftist civil society organisations. There has so far been no talk of similarly cracking down on guns.“There’s just no way that Trump is going to support gun reform,” Winkler said.Meanwhile, one of the bedrock causes of America’s unique struggle with gun violence goes untouched. An analysis by the Trace, a news outlet reporting on the issue, estimates that there are almost 400m guns in circulation in the US – that’s more than the number of people living in the country.More than four in 10 Americans live in households with a gun, according to the Pew Research Center. Though there is a partisan political divide in ownership, with 45% of Republicans owning a gun, that still leaves one in five Democrats also holding deadly weapons.As the number of guns has risen, so too have gun deaths. Almost 47,000 people died by the gun in the US in 2023, the latest year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has produced official figures. That’s the third-highest year on record, after a pandemic-induced spike in the previous two years.View image in fullscreenThe argument frequently proffered by second amendment lobbyists that this is just the way it is can easily be squelched by comparison with other rich countries. A 2016 CDC study cited by Pew put the US gun death rate at 10.6 per 100,000 people – more than five times the rate in Canada (2.1 per 100,000), and almost 20 times that of Spain (0.6).Such alarming statistics are set against a powerful subculture in which the gun manufacturing industry and pro-gun groups and magazines actively promote the allure of the sniper. “Best civilian sniper rifles”, was the headline from GunMag Warehouse.The online site Outdoor Life ran a feature on 16 of the “best sniper rifles”, defining the weapon broadly as the one that is “most capable of fulfilling the mission that whoever is carrying it is tasked with”. The author emphasised the huge variety of environments in which the sniper rifle has to operate, including “crowded cities”.First on the list was the AI AXSR which was praised for its “toughness, innovation, and accuracy”. The weapon trades to civilians for $11,000 on online firearms sites.The gun that delivered the single shot that ended Kirk’s life has been described by US investigators as a Mauser high-powered bolt-action rifle. Though it was not a purpose-built sniper rifle it was precise enough to allow the killer to strike from a rooftop about 160 metres away from his target.Josh Sugarmann, executive of the Violence Policy Center which has tracked the proliferation of the sniper subculture, sees its growth as part of the increasing militarization of the gun industry and its civilian offerings. “No one notices or seems to care that there is an industry actively designing and building the weapons that enable shooters to more effectively commit assassinations and mass shootings,” he said.“The gun industry is designing, building and promoting rifles that are effective at much longer range with the goal of ‘one shot, one kill’.” More

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      The Guardian view on the killing of Charlie Kirk: a perilous moment that may lead to more | Editorial

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      “Democracy is the way that we have diverse societies that don’t kill each other, largely,” Lilliana Mason, a leading scholar of partisanship, observed recently. She added: “As soon as we stop believing in it, it disappears.” Dr Mason’s own research suggests that there is sharply rising tolerance of political violence. On Wednesday, it claimed one more victim.The shocking killing of the co-founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, a hugely influential activist who rallied young people to Donald Trump’s cause and far-right ideology more broadly, has been widely and rightly condemned across the political spectrum. Leading Democrats and progressive activists made clear that such violence must not be tolerated.Before a perpetrator had even been identified, the president, like several other Republicans, blamed “radical left political violence”, claiming that liberal rhetoric against conservatives was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country”. Mr Trump himself faced two attempts on his life last year. He cited other victims, but not the many Democrats who have been targeted, including Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota state representative shot dead at her home alongside her husband, Mark, in June. Meanwhile, some far-right commentators spoke of vengeance.Political violence is hardly a new phenomenon in a country that has seen a civil war, four presidential assassinations, and lynchings. But it is rising again. Ordinary Americans are being radicalised. In such an environment, one thing unites the political poles; any prominent figure is vulnerable, though women and people of colour are particularly targeted. Threats to members of Congress rocketed last year.“Demonising those with whom you disagree” is indeed dangerous, but Mr Trump himself has normalised vicious attacks on opponents. The tolerance of violent action – as with Mr Trump’s blanket pardons for the January 6 rioters – sends a message too. The roots of violent acts are complex, but an environment conducive to political attacks may channel the propensities of potential perpetrators. Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, has warned that US politics may be on the brink “of an extremely violent era … The more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.” The US addiction to guns drastically increases the impact.Acts of political violence exact an appalling human toll in lives lost and families shattered; Mr Kirk’s death leaves two small children fatherless. But they also – by design – deter other people from political or other civic activity at all levels. The most extreme voices may persist and prevail. Blaming political adversaries before a perpetrator has even been identified risks fuelling anger and attacks, to everyone’s cost. Research by Dr Mason, of Johns Hopkins University, and Nathan Kalmoe, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that a fifth of respondents said political violence could sometimes be justified, but three-fifths thought it could sometimes be justified if the other side committed violence first.Yet other research notes that people appear less willing to condone violence if misperceptions of the other side’s extremism or propensity for force are corrected. In this perilous moment, the response to such hateful crimes should be to coalesce to stress non-violence and civic tolerance. To instead promote division will only increase the threat to politicians and activists of all stripes, and strike another blow to democracy itself.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Charlie Kirk’s death is a tragic marker of the indiscriminate nature of political violence | Margaret Sullivan

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      Once unleashed, political violence comes for everyone.It doesn’t know what side of the aisle you’re on or what your ideology might be, who your allies are or what your vision for the future includes. It doesn’t know what brand of media you consume or how many ardent followers you have.Political violence doesn’t know and doesn’t care about such things.Like an infectious disease, it simply – and efficiently – finds more and more victims. It isn’t picky about who they are.Whatever his beliefs, the killing of Charlie Kirk at a campus event in Utah on Wednesday is tragic. Also tragic is how partisan, violent and ugly much of the immediate reaction was, mostly on the right. Nancy Mace, a Republican congressperson from South Carolina, told a gathering of reporters that “Democrats own what happened today.” She offered no evidence, only partisan vitriol.On Fox News, one of the most prominent rightwing media figures, Jesse Watters, sought reprisal.“We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death,” Watters told the on-air audience. “Everybody’s accountable. And we’re watching … the politicians, the media and all these rats out there.”Granted that, on the left, some were too quick to say, in essence, “you reap what you sow,” but most prominent progressives – from Barack Obama to Mehdi Hasan – expressed sympathy and sadness. Some did so while acknowledging political differences, but emphasizing that those didn’t matter in this moment.There was plenty of blame and talk about accountability. But we already know that, when it comes to gun violence, there will be no real change, no real accountability. Because that’s hard, bipartisan work, and too much of America – deeply entrenched in tribal politics and egged on by a president who glories in violent rhetoric – is not interested.Gun “rights” – and gun-industry money – rule the day.Adding to the ugliness was the way social media revved its engines and did what it always does – made it worse.“The degree to which the algorithm on this platform is pushing video of the shooting is incredibly disturbing,” wrote CNN’s Abby Phillip on X. “There has to be some human that can turn the dial down in a situation like this.”That gun violence truly is an epidemic in America couldn’t have been clearer than when media coverage of Kirk’s assassination was interrupted by yet another school shooting, this one in Evergreen, Colorado.The Denver TV station KDVR offered a heartbreaking interview with a student who said he was new to the region.“I only moved here a few months ago, and I didn’t think this would happen so soon.”Those two words – so soon – speak volumes. School kids fully expect the life-changing trauma; they’re only hoping it might take a while to come to them.Because, as noted, it comes to everyone.Gabrielle Giffords, a former Democratic congressperson from Arizona, was shot and suffered a severe brain injury in 2012 and is now a passionate advocate for preventing gun violence. Admirable and dedicated as she is, her posted reaction seemed curious, although it surely was meant to offer some hope in a dark moment.“Democratic societies will always have political disagreements,” she wrote, “but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence.”But, as Giffords knows all too well, we already have allowed it. And America already is that country.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Charlie Kirk’s death shows political violence is now a feature of US life

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      The shooting of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk at an event in Utah marks another example of ongoing political violence in the US, now a feature of American life.Donald Trump confirmed on Wednesday that Kirk had died, saying: “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.”Kirk, on campus at Utah Valley University as part of a speaking tour called “American Comeback”. was asked a question by an audience member about mass shootings, including how many involved trans shooters, when he was shot in the neck.The political leanings and goals of the shooter, who is not in custody, are not yet known. Kirk is one of the highest profile allies of the US president, and his organization, Turning Point USA, has helped turn out voters for Trump and other Republicans. He is also known for his inflammatory, often racist and xenophobic commentary, particularly on college campuses.The shooting comes as a series of incidents over the past year show an increased level of violence related to political disagreements or intended to achieve political goals.Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024. Last December, a shooter targeted and killed the head of United Healthcare. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was burned in an arson attack in April. Judges and elected officials report increased threats and harassment. Several instances of violence have stemmed from opposition to the Gaza war. In June, a man dressed as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and wounded another state lawmaker and his wife. A gunman attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in August, killing a police officer.Surveys have shown increased acceptance of using violence for political aims across party spectrums. Robert Pape, who directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, wrote in the New York Times that a survey his team conducted in May was its “most worrisome yet”. “About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump’s agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions,” he wrote.“We’re becoming more and more of a powder keg,” Pape told the Guardian on Wednesday. Pape calls the current moment an “era of violent populism”.Condemnations of the shooting came from across the political spectrum. Pape has long argued that politicians need to speak out against violence, especially if it’s aligned with their own team.These condemnations are “extremely helpful here as we go forward. It won’t stop everything, but it helps to stop the snowball,” he said.Hasan Piker, the progressive streamer who was scheduled to debate Kirk later this month, said on his livestream on Wednesday that it was a “terrifying incident”.“The reverberation of people seeking out vengeance in the aftermath of this violent, abhorrent incident is going to be genuinely worrisome,” he said.The aftermath of Kirk’s death could include increased violence and retaliation, with some rightwing figures already calling for retribution.Libs of TikTok, the rightwing X account, put simply: “THIS IS WAR.” More