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Political violence history
The United States has repeatedly seen attacks on presidents and other political figures, with the eju.tv account tracing assassinations of Abraham Lincoln (1865, by John Wilkes Booth), James A. Garfield (1881, by Charles J. Guiteau), William McKinley (1901, by Leon Czolgosz), and John F. Kennedy (1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald).
“The United States of America’s history is full of violence”
That same timeline says the attack on former President Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania reopened debate on gun control and brought renewed attention to a “long history of political violence in the United States.”
The eju.tv piece also lists assassination attempts in which Ronald Reagan was seriously wounded in 1981 by John Hinckley Jr. and former President Theodore Roosevelt was shot in 1912 by John Schrank while campaigning to regain the White House.
It adds that “In a country with more guns than inhabitants, and where firearms are readily accessible, it is not surprising that shootings are the preferred method to kill or attempt to kill political officials,” quoting Thomas Klassen, a professor at York University’s School of Public Policy and Administration in Canada.
Gun debate and polarization
The eju.tv account says the Trump rally attack “reopened the gun control debate,” and it frames the moment as arriving “at a time of intense political polarization in the United States.”
It quotes Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, saying “political violence in the country, especially below the presidential level, is becoming increasingly partisan.”
The same piece points to examples including the attacks on Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 and Representative Steve Scalise in 2017, and it also describes an armed man arrested in 2022 near the residence of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh who told authorities his intent was to kill Kavanaugh because of his conservative views on abortion and gun control.
Separately, the Chico Enterprise-Record column argues that “we, the people, have a right to protest, to try to correct the wrongs of our past and promote peace among all Americans,” tying that right to the country’s history of violence and change.
Civil rights and institutions
MS NOW’s special series piece on the 250th anniversary says the Declaration of Independence promised liberty to people it enslaved, and it argues that the civil rights framework built to enforce that promise “continues to fall short.”
“Can Americans come together over the next week to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary”
It says the Supreme Court “further gutted the Voting Rights Act,” including a reference to “April’s regrettable Louisiana v. Callais ruling,” and it describes how the formal right to vote becomes “hollow” when “polling places close, voter rolls are purged and districts are redrawn to dilute marginalized voters’ political power.”
In the same MS NOW account, the Supreme Court’s actions are presented as abandoning “a model of racial justice that pairs the prohibition of discrimination with the prevention of it,” and it says that prevention model is “necessary if we are to come closer to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.”
Meanwhile, the WMagazín essay on U.S. history through novels frames the country’s 250-year span as a sequence of “great conflicts,” including “structural racism” and “the contradictions of the democratic system,” and it says the chosen novels “helped define what it means to be American.”
