I just saw the New York Times mornng news summary and one phrase caught my eye. It said that based on extensive discussions with Americans, they were mostly saddened, but not surprised about the Charlie Kirk assassination. On Wednesday evening, our two nephews were over for dinner. Nephew Will, who is suffering from a serious neck injury, said that while the shooting was deplorable, he was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner given the rhetoric of Charlie Kirk and the politically charged environment we live in today. I’m not altogether sure why but I reacted badly to Will‘s comment. Let me start by saying that Will is both a highly intelligent man, but also one of the sweetest people I know. He grew up as an all American boy, the son of a distinguished naval aviator (helicopter pilot) and a loyal Navy wife who raised her sons on one military base after another while Will’s father served this country with honor and distinction both in war (Vietnam) and in peace. Will was the captain of his high school football team, his senior class’ president, and even the Homecoming King. What would be more all American than that?
Having grown up in the military family, he was no stranger to guns and at one point as an adult, he owned both an AK-47 and an AR-15 assault rifle, which he used simply for sport target shooting. During one of the many mass shooting incidents Will and I discussed how awful the gun culture in America had become. He was deeply troubled by his own gun ownership and said that he would gladly give up the guns except that he had spent so much money on them. We came up with a mutually positive solution by my agreeing to “buy” the guns from him so that he could turn them over to the local police department to be destroyed. That plan assuaged both of our sensibilities about the need to de-escalate in some small way, the culture of gun violence that has permeated our country.
So I think it’s safe to say that I know that Will‘s heart is in the right place when it comes to American gun violence. It also seems that Will‘s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death is very much aligned with the thinking of many Americans. His surprise that this hadn’t happened sooner is spot-on what the Times found when they polled Americans for their reaction to the shooting. Saddened but not surprised. So why did I react badly to Will’s comment? I think it’s because I don’t want any of us to become numbed by the political violence that we are experiencing. I want us all to be shocked and horrified that such things can happen, no matter how naïve or innocent that may seem. In other words, I want the world to be a place that it’s never been and probably never will be. Perhaps I also know that in my heart of hearts I too am not surprised at Charlie Kirk‘s killing and I’m also wondering how it didn’t happen sooner. I know I secretly wondered the same thing when I heard that someone took a shot at Donald Trump in the summer of 2024. It seems I am no different than Will in my thinking, but I simply wish I didn’t think that way.
I was a child of the 60s, the worst decade of political violence in the history of America. I looked it up on Claude, my loyal AI assistant. Claude says, “Whether one considers assassination, group violence or individual acts of violence, the decade of the 1960s was considerably more violent than the several decades preceding it and ranks among the most violent in our history.” We all know the history so I won’t repeat it here. What did surprise me a bit was that Claude goes on to say that the 1970s were the next most violent, specifically because of it’s domestic terrorism. In that decade, 1,470 incidents of terrorism unfolded within the nation’s borders and 184 people were killed. By the mid-1970s, terrorist bombs were being set off in the country at an average rate of 50 to 60 a year. I guess I was too busy educating myself and launching my life to realize that. Claude goes on to say that the next most violent periods in American history where the Civil War era. And the Reconstruction Era that followed.
When assessing the underlying causes of the turbulence in the 1960s, we find that the decade’s violence was driven by multiple factors: the Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, generational conflict, urban decay, and the intersection of race and class in American society. The 1960s fundamentally changed America’s relationship with political violence, establishing patterns that would influence political discourse for decades to come. The period between the 60s and 2015 represents a complex evolution from the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s into different forms of extremism and domestic terrorism. It began with oppression of minorities, especially African Americans that was at the heart of both the era’s broader radical social movement as well as all the self-declared revolutionary groups. It then shifted to Right-Wing Violence in the late 1970s-1990s with the rise of white supremacist, anti-abortion, and militia groups. The number of violent events declined, but targets shifted from property to people—minorities, abortion providers, and federal agents. The Rise of Militia Movements (1980s-1990s) like Ruby Ridge (1992), the Waco Siege (1993), and the Oklahoma City Bombing (1995). The anger was mostly directed towards the government, but it was inflicted on individual people. After the 1970s, we went into a dramatic decline in political violence. It was as though the 80s found us spent with regard to political violence, both the left and the right having had their moment.
Both the left and the right like to point fingers at one another as the perpetrators of political violence. The reality is that since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives. Since 2015 we have seen a particularly turbulent period marked by several major incidents and a concerning escalation in politically motivated attacks. There was the 2017 Congressional Baseball Shooting followed by the Charlottesville Attack. The 2021 January 6th Capitol Attack, no matter how you want to label it, was the most notable act of political violence in the past decade. The fact that all of those perpetrators have been pardoned by Donald Trump is a notable indicator of how he views political violence. So the question is, should it be surprising that we have seen two assassination attempts on Donald Trump in 2024, an attack on the Pennsylvania governors mansion, an attempted assassination of the Michigan governor, the killing of two Minnesota politicians, the killing of a healthcare CEO on the streets of New York, and now the murder of Charlie Kirk? At least 300 incidents of political violence have taken place since the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, according to Reuters. The FBI’s 2024 Hate Crime Statistics show 11,679 incidents involving 14,243 victims, marking the second-worst year on record since data collection began in 1991.
These shifts have created a new reality: millions of Americans willing to undertake, support, or excuse political violence, defined here (following the violence-prevention organization Over Zero) as physical harm or intimidation that affects who benefits from or can participate fully in political, economic, or sociocultural life. At the heart of this is polarization, not mere policy disagreement, but visceral dislike and distrust of opposing parties. I like to call it tribalism, and it’s clear that Americans’ feelings of anger, contempt, and hatred for political opponents have intensified more sharply than any of us want to believe. As of 2023, the United States was the only Western nation to rank among the world’s 50 most conflict-ridden countries, driven by rising political violence. The incidents span the political spectrum and have targeted both elected officials and civilians, creating an atmosphere of heightened tension that many experts warn could continue to escalate without intervention. The rhetoric we are seeing today demonizing the left as the perpetrators of this trend of political violence is simply not accurate or helpful. The truth is that both sides are to blame, and as much as the right chooses to point their fingers at the left and I want to point my finger at the right, neither will make the situation better. In fact, such recriminations always make matters worse.
We are once again walking the line in America. That line is the boundary of civility and perhaps civilization itself. We need to de-escalate on all sides and we need to expect better of ourselves as naïve as history proves that thinking to be.