“Political violence is unacceptable and has no place in this country,” said Arizona’s governor, Katie Hobbs, and “political violence has absolutely no place in this country”, insisted California congresswoman Barbara Lee, while President Joe Biden stated, “There’s no place for this kind of violence in America.”
“As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society,” affirmed Nancy Pelosi, referencing the attacker who broke into her home in 2022 to kidnap her and, in her absence, seriously injured her husband. “There is no place for political violence in this country, period,” said Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a kidnapping plot by far-right militiamen in 2020 who intended to make her the centerpiece of a show trial.
Dozens of others reached for versions of this “no place in America” declaration, and I wondered if “no place” meant something like when Jesus was born in a stable because, according to the Gospel of Luke, “there was no place for them in the inn.” That is, the United States is full to overflowing of violence of many kinds and afflicted with many enthusiasts for violence and the weapons with which it is most often fatally inflicted.
All this came in the wake of an event in Pennsylvania in which the ear of an elderly man was grazed by a bullet fired by a young man with a semi-automatic weapon. One bystander died of a bullet to the head and two others were seriously injured. Later that night four people were killed in a nightclub in Birmingham, Alabama, and nine others wounded by another gunman. Four more people were killed in a home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in yet another shooting Sunday, and three people were shot in Charleston, South Carolina, non-fatally. None of them were running for president, so these other stories weren’t major news.
You could drop in dozens of local news stories of shootings like that any weekend in this country over the past decade years, if it wasn’t the kind of week in which the carnage was so immense it became a major news story, as when an 18-year-old gunman murdered 19 elementary-school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, in May of 2022, while heavily armed police stood by. Every day, on average, 327 Americans are shot and 117 die of the injuries, according to one gun-control-advocacy site.
On Wednesday a white policeman shot and killed a Black shoplifter reportedly suffering from mental health issues in Charlotte, North Carolina. The United States is drenched in violence, riddled with violence, rotten with violence. There is room for violence in this country founded on slavery and the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans. There has always been epidemic violence against women in this country. But a lot of recent violence has been cultivated as an asset for rightwing politicians and a cash crop for gun manufacturers.
The day the Black shoplifter died, I spoke at a campaign launch for a first time San Francisco candidate. So did the activist Cleve Jones, who talked about Harvey Milk. In the late 1970s Jones was a young intern for and friend of Milk, the out gay politician whose election to San Francisco’s board of supervisors was a watershed moment in queer history. On the morning of 27 November 1978, he heard that Milk’s ally, Mayor George Moscone, had been shot and rushed to City Hall, where he saw thensupervisor Dianne Feinstein rush past him, one sleeve and hand stained with blood. It was Milk’s blood from her attempt to take his pulse when she found him shot, and moments later he saw his friend lying dead of five bullets fired at close range. Along with the mayor, he had been assassinated by a disgruntled former supervisor, the rightwinger and ex-cop Dan White.
Dianne Feinstein became mayor, then ran for the US senate, and after winning she introduced the 1994 federal assault rifle ban that passed but which Republicans allowed to lapse a decade later. Democrats have long tried to institute gun control laws; Republicans have largely tried to prevent or overturn them. In Pennsylvania, where a 20-year-old man climbed onto a roof Saturday, anyone over 18 can buy a semi-automatic like the one he wielded without a waiting period, and private sales don’t require background checks. It has in recent years become an open-carry state, as have the majority of states in this country.
One person pulled the trigger; thousands of elected officials, lobbyists, and gun industry employees worked to make it possible for him to do so. To make more room for violence in America.
The elderly man – and yeah, of course I’m talking about Donald Trump – whose ear was grazed had instigated a violent assault on Congress in which hundreds of defenders of the institution and process of democracy were injured, sprayed with bear mace, stabbed with American flags, crushed in a door, battered with barricades, and he has long encouraged political violence.
His associate in trying to steal the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani, was found liable for spreading lies that encouraged Trump supporters to target two Black women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who had been ordinary Georgia election workers. The resultant threats, racial slurs, and menacing appearances that forced Freeman to sell her home and both to go into hiding. A jury awarded them $148m in compensatory and punitive damages late last year.
“How death threats get Republicans to fall in line behind Trump” was the headline of a report earlier this year, and a 2020 report by ABC News “identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.” There is room for violence in America. Some politicians have long tried to make more room for it. One of them escaped a bullet on Saturday. A lot of other Americans have not been so lucky.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
