Trump's shooting is shocking, but America's gun problem made it unsurprising

It’s possible to be shocked by the attempted assassination of Donald Trump without being truly surprised. Gun violence and toxic politics have become not the exception but the rule in the US in the 21st century. No surprise there.

Even so, this is the most astonishingly lucky escape for the former president. If the bullet that hit his ear had been an inch to one side, the presumed Republican nominee for November’s presidential election would have been killed. The assassination attempt at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, however is indeed shocking, even by the standards of nastiness and hatred that have eroded civility in American public life.

Investigations about the shooter continue, but we do know that Pennsylvania is a vital 50-50 state between Mr Trump and President Joe Biden. Mr Trump has been campaigning hard while Mr Biden – beset by questions about his age and fitness – was taking a weekend’s rest at his beach house in Delaware. He called Mr Trump and said “there’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick. It’s sick”.

But this sickness is itself not new. This may be one of the strangest, and nastiest, campaigns in American political history, but American public life has always been tinged by violence. It was summed up in an old piece of American doggerel: “How the West was won / Through the barrel of a gun.”

Nowadays the variety of military-style weaponry available to American civilians is truly astonishing. Statista Research suggests that the 350 million Americans (a figure that includes children) own between them about 400 million firearms. Since only about 43 per cent of the population do own guns, many of them must own an assortment, in some cases high-powered military-type weapons. “The right to bear arms” remains constitutional even if also highly controversial.

And of course, American political assassination has a long and difficult history. After defeating the Confederacy in the Civil War, then president Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address promised that “with malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right; let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds”.

Lincoln was then assassinated in a Washington theatre. In 1963, then president John F Kennedy was assassinated on a pre-1964 election trip to Dallas, Texas. The gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald, but the circumstances of the killing have given rise to endless conspiracy theories, more than even Hollywood could imagine.

These include the widespread, yet never substantiated, idea that there must have been a second gunman. The civil rights leader Malcolm X was murdered in 1965, then Mr Kennedy’s brother Robert Kennedy – a presidential hopeful – was assassinated in 1968. That same year, the great civil rights leader the Rev Dr Martin Luther King was also shot dead.

And so, as the facts begin to emerge about this most recent Trump assassination attempt, what we do know is that the presumed shooter was quickly shot dead by US law enforcement. He was identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about an hour away from the rally location. He was also registered as a Republican voter, and at the time of writing there are few clues what any potential motive might be.

But what is clear is that in the run up to the November election, the maelstrom of American politics is becoming ever more divisive and turbulent.

There will be questions about how anyone with a rifle managed to get near to the Trump rally. Some witnesses claim that they saw a man with a gun and may have alerted police. And Mr Trump, wounded and bleeding, proved himself as a politician who seizes an opportunity on the political stage when he used the platform that presented itself before being hustled away for medical treatment.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” he yelled to the crowd and the TV cameras, pumping his fist to the crowd and appearing to shout: “Fight! Fight!” The crowd roared back and chanted “USA! USA!”

But what is also true is that attempts by former president Bill Clinton and others to limit the access of American civilians to military-style combat weapons have failed. Challenges in the US Supreme Court, with a majority of judges nominated by Republicans, have made the US an extraordinary outlier in the constitutional right to bear arms.

In Texas, for example, and elsewhere, no citizen can legally buy alcohol until aged 21, but they can legally own a gun at 18. And recently more Americans died of gun-related injuries – including suicides – than in any other year on record, according to statistics from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

For now, two TV clips from July 2024 appear to have transformed American politics. A former president defiant and bleeding; a current president lost for words. Just over three months to go before the vote. There could be plenty of surprises ahead.