Alan Zendell, September 16, 2024

When Catelyn Stark and her entire entourage of lackeys and bodyguards had their throats cut during a state dinner, it was a thing of beauty, artistically. It was a perfect coup executed precisely, and it resulted in enough blood and death to satisfy fans of Game of Thrones. But that was fiction.

I was not a fan, at first, because I thought the graphic violence and sex were gratuitous substitutes for quality writing and acting. I was wrong about that, and the brilliance of George R. R. Martin’s epic story won me over. After a few episodes, the blood and gore seemed almost cartoonish, hardly the thing of horror movies, and that troubles me.

Assassinations are common tropes of fantasy and spy novels. In real life, they are acts of desperation. A political assassination sparked World War 1, and another one threw our country into chaos in 1962, when John F. Kennedy was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald. The failed attempt by John Hinckley to assassinate Ronald Reagan two months after he was inaugurated averted even worse chaos as the country was still healing from Vietnam.

In some cultures, assassination is an acceptable means of transferring power, as in North Korean leader Kin Jong Un having his uncle murdered. In ours, there is absolutely no justification for attempting to kill a leader, ever. Aside from the basic immorality of the crime, resorting to that kind of violence creates crises that destroy nations or plunge them into horrible conflicts. Then why do they happen?

For two reasons: insanity and politics, not necessarily exclusively of each other. Oswald was a Communist sympathizer who had earlier defected to the Soviet Union and supported Fidel Castro in Cuba. He hated fascism, and while Kennedy was hardly a fascist, in Oswald’s distorted worldview, anyone who attacked Communists had to be a fascist. His history of problems with the law both as a civilian and a U. S. Marine, suggest sociopathic tendencies. John Hinckley, on the other hand, had no political motive. He was just nuts, and his jury concurred.

The two recent attempts on Donald Trump’s life follow similar patterns of motivation. Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to kill Donald Trump in July, was a disturbed young man. He had right-wing leanings, and he had stalked both Trump and President Biden on the internet. We don’t know why he did what he did, but’s it safe to assume he wasn’t entirely sane. And yesterday’s apparently failed attempt to kill Trump by Ryan Wesley Routh seems to have been motivated by his support for Ukraine and his fear that Trump would allow Russia to overwhelm that nation.

It’s easy to blame the divisiveness Trump has promulgated, but it’s more complicated than that. First, none of the four incidents described above was overtly political – that is, none of them appears to have been about a left- or right-wing extremist attempting to kill an opposition leader. That’s the only good news in this madness. One thing that stands out, however, is that all four incidents involved guns the perpetrators shouldn’t have had.

It’s a simple truth that modern America is locked in a battle over sensible gun control laws that is continually being won by right-wing extremists. This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment to the Constitution which was intended to maintain a well-armed, regulated militia. It is about profit and political gain at the expense of a culture that has become wholly irresponsible. The latest school shooting, in Ohio, had more to do with an irresponsible father instilling a young son with the wrong values than anything else.

As a supporter of policies that cause people to think they have right to take up arms to get what they want, it’s reasonable to remind Trump that he is as much a part of the problem as the nut cases who use guns to commit mayhem. Two attempts on his life might make Trump rethink his position on gun control, but it’s more likely that he’ll blame progressives for going after him.

Trump’s ever more extremist positions as a candidate have America frightened, both by the prospects of a second Trump term, and by the divisive, angry climate he created. He has energized the worst tendencies in Americans and attempted to normalize them for his own benefit. I do not support political violence of any kind, but I also have no sympathy for Trump. If you believe in karma, he deserves what he got.

We seem caught in a vicious cycle in this election season. One side continually advocates violence, and then looks on in wonder as it erupts against them. This is the culture Trump has fostered, and it must stop. The sooner he’s off our radar, the better off we’ll be.