Guns and politics don't mix. Neither do guns and people.

Former president Donald Trump was grazed by a bullet at a rally in Butler, PA, earlier this evening.  A spectator who was close to the rally stage was quoted saying that Trump had just turned his head from facing the teleprompter screen on the left to face the screen on the right when he was shot. The fact that the bullet hit him just as he turned his head seems to indicate that the shooter was attempting to kill the former president with a head shot.  One person sitting near Trump was killed and two others were critically wounded, turning this violent evening into another American mass shooting.  Law enforcement officers found and killed the shooter shortly after the shooting took place.  Nothing is known at this time about his or her identity or motives.

It has been 61 years since President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas in 1963; 56 years since presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was killed after giving a campaign speech at a hotel in Los Angeles in 1968; 52 years since presidential candidate George Wallace was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland in 1972; 43 years since President Ronald Reagan was shot outside a hotel in Washington, D.C. in 1981.  Gun violence has become part of this nation’s DNA. It is a national cancer we have been unable to cure.

Shortly after Trump was shot, President Biden condemned the violence and said that “there is no place in America for this kind of violence.  It’s sick, it’s sick,” Biden said from his vacation house in Delaware. 

Trump was rushed bleeding from the rally stage by the Secret Service and taken to a nearby hospital.  Shortly after the incident, Trump posted on Truth Social, “It is incredible that such an act can take place in our Country.”

Incredible, yes, but also understandable, if not inevitable.  We now have more guns than people in this country.  The Brady Center estimates that there are more than 20 million AR-15 style semiautomatic rifles in private hands, in addition to countless pistols and high-powered hunting rifles capable of killing from great distances.

Much will be written in the coming days about our toxic political climate, especially in this presidential election year.  Donald Trump and the Republican Party will no doubt try to find some way to blame the shooting on Joe Biden and the Democrats.  Immediately after the shooting, people at the rally turned to members of the media and screamed, “This is your fault, you did this!”

But death threats against political figures, government employees, election officials, judges and prosecutors happen so often they have become part of the background of our national life.  Supreme Court justices are now protected by U.S. Marshalls.  Senior officers of the Congress have armed protection details and are ferried around in armored cars.  All of this is now taken as a normal part of the way things are in America today, and that includes the mass shootings and killings that happen so often, they too have been absorbed into our national consciousness as normal.

None of this is normal.  Guns are a scourge.  Political violence like that which occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, is not normal, despite efforts by Donald Trump and the Republican Party to make it appear that way.  Trump has even managed recently to blame the violence at the Capitol on Nancy Pelosi, who was then Speaker of the House of Representatives. 

Whoever is to blame for the attempted killing of Donald Trump is beside the point.  The shooting of Trump should be condemned.  Gun violence should be condemned.  There is something deeply wrong with America right now.  Trump was a victim today, but we are all the victims of the political violence that has proliferated in rhetoric and now, reality.  The political atmosphere that birthed this attempt on a former president’s life has infected us all.  If it is allowed to continue, we are doomed.