Since the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, our politicians, leader writers and commentators have quite lost their heads. The Guardian declares that the shooting “marks a shocking and frightening moment”. Others across the political spectrum are emitting similar emotions.
Trump, Corey Comperatore, who was killed while attending the rally, and the wounded should not have been fired at. But you know and I know that America is a brutal, gun carrying country saturated with political and social violence.
The question to ask is not how could this happen? But, will such savagery ever stop in the most globally powerful and influential nation on earth?
Here is a brief history of how the gun has intervened and often warped democracy and public life in the US. Abraham Lincoln, killed in Washington DC by a Confederate sympathiser in 1865; John W Stephens, Republican senator, killed by a member of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina in 1870; James M Hinds, Republican, also killed by the Klan in Arkansas two years earlier.
In Uganda, in 1961, the film West Side Story was a big hit when I was growing up there. The song “America” was a favourite on the radio and among the young, who sang along but missed the cutting truths about that country. What I most remember about the 60s – my formative teenage years – were horrifying slayings of key figures, one after another. John F Kennedy in 1963 in Dallas, Martin Luther King in Memphis and Robert Kennedy in LA in 1968. Unlike most of my university mates, I never wanted to live in macho America where no one is safe.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously wounded in Washington DC. In 1998, Tommy Burks, a Democrat senator, was shot dead by a political rival in Tennessee. Other local and national politicians were mowed down by the end of that century.
In 2011, Democrat Congresswoman Gabby Gifford was seriously injured in a mass shooting in Arizona. And in 2015, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a Democrat senator, was killed by a white supremacist. In 2022, Trump supporter David DePape ferociously attacked US politician Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.
Remember, too, how Trump incited his followers to cause havoc, destruction and terror in Washington’s Capitol building.
America was stolen from the original inhabitants, most of whom were slaughtered. Hollywood westerns mythologised the conquerors; weapon ownership became a core part of the American identity. The immensely powerful and popular gun lobby taps into this dangerous belief system.
How many children and other innocents have been gunned down? How many more?
When innocents are murdered by mad loners or bad brutes, most locals get defensive and defend the right to hold arms more aggressively. No other western nation is prepared to sacrifice its young on the altar of gun ownership. But in the US, nobody dares to hope that this scourge will ever end.
In 1995, some months after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, I went over with a Channel 4 crew to make a documentary. The bombing by anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed 168 people and injured 680. All the interviewees said guns would have stopped the bombers. How? I asked, and the replies were either touchingly naïve or barking mad.
America was stolen from the original inhabitants, most of whom were slaughtered. Hollywood westerns mythologised the conquerors; weapon ownership became a core part of the American identity. The immensely powerful and popular gun lobby taps into this dangerous belief system
In 1989, Mr Brown and I went to New York. It was his first time there and he had been joking that he feared deranged gun-toters. On our second day there, in Manhattan, a man was killed yards from us. He was slashing at pedestrians with a machete and the police gunned him down. Minutes later, New Yorkers carried on as if nothing that irregular had happened. One of them saw us quivering, smiled and said: “You visiting? Welcome to New York. You’all have a good day now.” This is their normal.
Trump supporters and conspiracists are making out that what has happened was triggered by liberals or Democrats. They know that whatever his motives, Thomas Matthew Crooks did what too many Americans think they are entitled to do – if you want to avenge yourself against real or imagined “enemies”, get weapons, use them.
Trump will not condemn this culture. To do so would be un-American, and he believes he is the all-American saviour of the nation.