Trump shot: latest in wave of assassination attempts

“This kind of violence should not be tolerated in America,” President Biden said. Saturday saidfollowed by shooting At a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania, the former president was injured and a spectator died.

But in fact, this kind of violence has a long history in American politics: Four U.S. presidents have been killed in office, and in modern times, nearly all of them have been the target of assassination plots of varying degrees.

In recent years, with the overall atmosphere of political turmoil – Trump himself, the new crown epidemic, police violence and the protests it has sparked, attacks on public officials from both parties in the United States on January 6 have also emerged one after another. Seems to be becoming more common.

Recent examples include Photographed in 2017 A left-wing extremist opened fire at a Republican congressional baseball practice, seriously injuring Rep. Steve Scalise; he was a Donald Trump supporter Who sent the email bomb? In 2018, more than a dozen prominent Democrats; Conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, 2020; abortion rights supporter Attempted murder Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was in this house in 2022; as were the QAnon followers who attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, When trying to attack her, In 2022.

The violence has had a clear impact on the functioning of American politics. House and Senate campaigns spend money on security Increased by 500% That number will be between 2020 and 2022, The Washington Post reported.

This isn’t just a US phenomenon either: there have been assassinations around the world recently. In the UK, two MPs have been killed in recent years: Labour MP Jo Cox was killed by a Far right Conservative MP David Ames in the days before the 2016 Brexit referendum Stabbed to death by ISIS Supporters of 2021. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Survived the stab wound During the 2018 presidential campaign. In 2021, Haitian Prime Minister Jovenel Moise Assassinated by mercenaries.

last year Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio killedAnd before Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo AbeIn January this year, South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung Survived a stab wound to the neckSlovak Prime Minister Robert Fico Shot and nearly killed In May, Mexico experienced far more political violence than most other countries. At least 36 candidates are running for office According to The New York Times, 100 people were killed across the country before the recent election.

There are many suspected conspiracies Targeting Ukrainian President Zelensky Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Still, it’s hard to say for sure whether political murders are increasing. There’s a data problem: Compared with other forms of political violence (violent protests, terrorist bombings), assassinations remain relatively rare, and attempts to successfully kill a target, or even close to successful attempts, are even rarer.

But some data suggests that political violence is becoming more common. According to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, which includes incidents of political violence from 1970 to 2020, Number of assassinations worldwide The number of cases dropped sharply from more than 1,000 per year in the early 1990s to less than 100 per year in 1999, then began to rise slowly again, jumping to more than 900 in 2015. This trend roughly corresponds to International armed conflicts intensify around the worlda figure that also fell in the 1990s but has risen recently.

Threats of violence are growing even faster. In the United States, Capitol Police 9,625 threats reported In 2021, the number of MPs who voted against the bill was 3,939, while in 2017, it was only 3,939.

What’s driving this trend? Rachel Kleinfeld, political violence researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think Political violence, including assassinations, becomes more common in countries where elections are competitive and the balance of power is likely to shift, where partisan politics is a dominant social identity, and where institutional constraints on violence are weak. All of these reasons apply to the United States right now, which is why Kleinfeld believes the country is particularly vulnerable to a surge in political violence.

Kleinfeld also points out that today’s political violence is closely related to Early stage In eras when terrorist violence was common (such as the 1970s, when it peaked in the United States with more than 1,470 attacks, and the decade after 9/11, when there were 214 attacks), today’s perpetrators are more likely to not belong to any formal organization and to self-radicalize through online participation.

Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Weil, terrorism researchers at Georgetown University, wrote in an article article An article published two years ago noted that political assassinations have become more common around the world, in part because of the emergence of so-called “accelerationism” — the deliberate incitement of political chaos or societal breakdown to hasten political transition — as a more prominent tactic among extremists. “For extremists seeking to sow chaos and accelerate some kind of catastrophic societal collapse, high-profile politicians are an attractive target,” they wrote, because they embody the political order these extremists are trying to destroy.

Previous waves of political violence have occurred in times when security was laxer and politicians more accessible. Think of John F. Kennedy’s public motorcade through Dallas, something no president would think of doing today. But Hoffman and Weil also point out that new technology is making assassinations easier, even as politicians and governments invest more in security. Consider The homemade gun that killed Abewhich the assassin assembled using parts and instructions he found online, or an attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro Use explosive drones In 2018.

Hoffman said in an email to Vox that the attacks on Trump “do fit into a trend … where attacks on elected officials are becoming more common, and arguably even viewed as the norm in our politically polarized country.”

Political violence is a phenomenon that tends to feed on itself. Attacks provide a pretext for more attacks, leading to prolonged violence, such as Italy’s notorious “Years of leadership” From the late 1960s to the 1980s, assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings committed by left-wing extremist groups were common.

Another very inconvenient fact about political assassinations is that, if successful, they usually achieve their political goals, even if not always in the way the assassins might have intended: The murder of Abraham Lincoln and his replacement with the pro-states-rights Southerner Andrew Johnson radically altered the course of post-Civil War Reconstruction. In 1995, right-wing Israelis killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the wake of the historic Oslo Accords, dealing a severe, even fatal, blow to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This triggered a dramatic reckoning in Japanese politics The assassins’ primary target was the controversial Unification Church.

We still don’t know the specific motives of the gunman who tried to shoot Trump, or what impact this incident will have on the upcoming election or American politics in general. But it’s safe to say that whatever the gunman’s intentions were, the impact would have been much greater if he had adjusted his aim by a few inches.

When the stakes of political competition begin to become life-or-death, and political violence of all kinds becomes more tolerated, an increase in assassinations, both in the United States and abroad, seems almost inevitable.