The attack on Donald Trump

Less than an hour after the assassination of former President Donald Trump, JD Vance already knew who was to blame: the Democrats. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on X. “This rhetoric led directly to the assassination of President Trump.” Vance, a former “never-Trumper” now reborn as a “Trumpier-than-thou,” was rewarded with the vice presidential nomination for this unjustified accusation. But he was not the only one jumping to conclusions. Democrats and Republicans alike called for an end to political vitriol, assuming that the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the election had incited the shooter to violence.

In fact, we don’t know why Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, a town about an hour from his home, to shoot Trump. But we all know this type of perpetrator all too well: a white loner who was bullied in high school and had easy access to guns. That’s the profile of almost all school shooters. The motives of these young men are a mix of suicidal mental illness, anger, and a desire to finally be seen. Killing children gets noticed; imagine the attention you would get if you assassinated the former—and possibly future—leader of the free world and sparked massive domestic unrest. But there is one striking difference between this event and an “ordinary” school shooting. This time, our political leaders and pundits are placing the blame on the media and politicians, on the language they use, instead of where it belongs: on a society sick of guns. America leads the world in mass shootings because America leads the world in civilian ownership of weapons of war. We have nearly 400 million privately owned guns, including 20 million AR-15s, and there are few regulations about who can use them. For people in other countries, these statistics are hardly credible. If we want to stop the carnage, we need to change more than just our rhetoric. We need to change our gun laws.