Nonviolent civics is our right & our responsibility
A lone gunman may have put the American democratic republic at risk; we must all work together to ensure nonviolent civics prevails.
On Saturday, July 13, 2024, while former President Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, shots were fired into the rally, killing one attendee and seriously injuring another. The former President’s right ear was grazed by a bullet, and he is confirmed to be free of any serious injury. The U.S. Secret Service fired back within seconds and killed the alleged shooter. The shooting is being investigated as a possible assassination attempt.
President Joe Biden issued a very strong statement demanding that all Americans condemn political violence. He noted former President Trump has a right to conduct his campaign event in peace. The two later spoke by phone.
Democracy requires all people be allowed to work out political differences nonviolently and through civic engagement. Letting violence interfere with nonviolent civic engagement, what the First Amendment describes as "peaceable assembly", undermines democracy itself and threatens all of our rights. Whatever your politics, political violence is an attack on all of us.
Calls for civility & solidarity
There have been numerous calls from across the political spectrum for an end to extreme rhetoric. The New York Times is reporting:
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin who played a role in Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the result of the 2020 election, joined Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, in calling for national unity and a cooling of political rhetoric. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Johnson said on CNN, quoting President Abraham Lincoln. He added “I think the greatest threat to America right now is the fact that we’re horribly divided.”
Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic Speaker of the House, whose husband was attacked and nearly killed by a political extremist, said:
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. I thank God that former President Trump is safe.
Leaders of government around the world have condemned the shooting and expressed solidarity with the American people and well wishes to the victims. Allies of the United States expressed shock and alarm at the rising tide of violence against democracy, and wished Trump well. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a statement of solidarity, saying:
Such violence has no justification and no place anywhere in the world. Never should violence prevail. I am relieved to learn that Donald Trump is now safe and wish him a speedy recovery. My condolences go out to the close ones of this attack’s victim, a rally attendee. I extend my wishes for strength to everyone who is horrified by this event. I wish America emerges stronger from this.
Even Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro expressed sympathy and denounced the shooting. According to the Associated Press, he said: “We have been adversaries, but I wish President Trump health and long life, and I repudiate the attack.”
Political violence threatens everyone’s basic human rights & freedoms
Sadly, American history has been plagued by deadly political violence.
In the 1830s and 1840s, a terrorist campaign by so-called Know Nothings targeted immigrants and churches.
Villanova University—where I studied and taught, and whose culture of truth, charity, and unity, I love—was established by Augustinian friars whose Philadelphia church was destroyed in one of those attacks.
The University stands as a testament to the best kind of resistance to violent extremism: education, solidarity, and service.
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Candidates and civilians have continued to be targets of political violence:
In 1865, President Lincoln was killed for saving the Union and freeing millions of enslaved people.
The KKK and other terrorist groups staged anti-democracy attacks and racial murders for more than a century.
In 1908, former President Theodore Roosevelt was shot while campaigning, and survived. He had initially become President when his predecessor William McKinley was shot and killed, in September 1901.
We still don’t have one universally accepted telling of the facts of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in November 1963, despite numerous in-depth investigations.
In 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and two months later, Robert F. Kennedy, the fallen president’s brother, was shot and killed.
In 1972, candidate George Wallace was shot and paralyzed, and in March 1981, Pres. Ronald Reagan was shot, two months into his first term, and survived.
In recent years, we have seen how treating political opponents as enemies can sow the seeds of violence.
In 2020, right-wing extremist groups, apparently aiming to start a civil war, plotted and carried out attacks in Minneapolis.
On January 6, 2021, we saw thousands of people radicalized by extreme rhetoric and coordinated disinformation attack the U.S. Capitol.
Some who participated in that attack stocked an arsenal outside of Washington, D.C., which criminal defendants later admitted was part of a plot to use violent force to stop the peaceful transfer of power to the President-elect.
Fortunately, those recent plots largely failed, though lives were lost and the fabric of American society has been seriously frayed. Political violence always has the aim of degrading faith in cooperative civic process and creating room for aggressions against the rights and safety of individuals and groups of people.
How we respond to acts of violence will shape what kind of future we have.
We should also remember the mass shooting at a Republican practice session for the Congressional baseball game, and be thankful Rep. Steve Scalise and others survived. Before that, there was the tragic mass shooting attack on a local event with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona. One of the victims of that shooting was a little girl named Christina Taylor Green.
At a memorial service in 2011, President Barack Obama said of her:
She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
The President added, with emotion: “I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it,” calling on all Americans to “do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.”
Safeguarding our civic space
The extremist who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump used an assault rifle—a combat weapon. The Gun Violence Archive reports 295 mass shootings have taken place in the United States this year so far; at least 9,122 Americans have been killed by firearm, not counting suicides. An estimated 427,000 Americans have died by firearm since January 2014. This is absolutely incompatible with the open, free and self-governing society envisioned by the Constitution.
We must band together to eliminate combat weapons from American communities. This should not be controversial; the Bill of Rights is clearly structured to establish a safe space for open democratic-republican self-government. Read as a whole, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—including the 2nd Amendment—clearly describe a democratic republic in which people have a natural, overriding, and unalienable right to engage politically without fear of violent repression.
I once had a brief conversation with Sen. John McCain. I thanked him for his service, and we talked about what makes democracy work. He praised citizens who do “the hardest thing there is in a democracy, which is to sit down with people they disagree with, listen, share, trust, and have serious conversations, where people like each other afterward,” adding “We need that more and more.”
A big question for many Americans is how to express sympathy for the victims of the shooting, including Donald Trump, when they oppose, or even fear, the political agenda promoted by Trump and his allies. The fact is: You don’t have to support Trump’s candidacy to recognize that violence is unacceptable, and where he or others close to him may have breached the rule of law, the Constitution stands as a safeguard of our republican democracy.
We should not be naïve about committed political opponents suddenly becoming friends; they won’t. We can say with clarity, however, that solidarity across political perspectives has become a more salient shared value since the shooting. People of all backgrounds, including those who have used inflammatory rhetoric in the past, are talking about the need to be committed to each other’s common human right to safety and to a democracy free of political violence.
In a haunting reflection on Saturday’s attack, Zack Beauchamp warns “A gunman’s bullet has just sent the country hurtling into an abyss. The only question now is how far we fall.” He may be right; it is all of our duty to make sure that fall does not happen, to establish and reinforce the open civic space that Christina Taylor Green and Sen. McCain—along with millions who have given their life in service of the republic, or just lived good and decent lives—believed in.
We can emerge from this crime united in a recommitment to nonviolent, cooperative civic debate.