I won’t say our political climate has never been more divisive, mostly because we had an actual shooting civil war. That was pretty divisive when you get down to it and while things aren’t great right now, we’re not there, either.

And based on how I figure that will go if it does happen, I’d rather we just skip that if at all possible.

But the climate is bad. It has to be to have a second attempt on Donald Trump’s life.

However, some “experts” argue that the problem isn’t political discourse, it’s our right to keep and bear arms that’s the real problem.

“Political violence does not represent the values of America and has no place in our democracy. But, yet again, a person armed with hate and an assault weapon attempted to take the former president’s life,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “There is no room for violence of any kind in our country and we must keep firearms out of the hands of people hellbent on tearing apart our political process and our communities.”

Giffords, the group founded by the former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords after she survived an assassination attempt in 2011, echoed that sentiment, saying on X: “We’re relieved that former President Trump is safe after the FBI reported an apparent assassination attempt in Florida. Gun violence has no place in America. Weak laws make all of us less safe.”

The group Brady: United Against Gun Violence similarly called on the nation to “come together to condemn political violence and address America’s gun violence crisis”.

It’s not really shocking that gun control groups would use this to advance their agenda. It’s what they do. You can’t swing a Springfield Haitian’s lunch without hitting one trying to capitalize on anything they can to push gun control

Expecting them not to do so, despite the fact that I think they all wish one of the two would-be assassins had succeeded, is like expecting people not to breathe.

But there are less obvious anti-gun efforts underway.

Experts say the rising tide of political violence is hardly unique to the US, but it is exceptionally deadly here.

“There’s a myth that Americans are a uniquely violent people, and we’re not,” said Garen Wintemute, head of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis who has studied the association between firearm ownership and political violence for years. “What we have here is a uniquely high rate of fatal assaultive violence, and that’s because we have a unique level of access to firearms, which changes the outcome.”

According to research conducted by his team, Americans who had bought guns since the disruptions of the Covid pandemic in 2020 or who regularly carry loaded firearms in public expressed higher levels of susceptibility to political violence. A similar but less marked trend was found among owners of assault-style rifles, like the kind often used in mass shootings and in the Pennsylvania attempt on Trump’s life.

“There are, on any given day in the United States, thousands of armed people walking the streets who support the idea of political violence and are willing to engage in it,” Wintemute said.

Of course, Wintemute presents himself as an expert on violence. He’s an emergency room doctor who is running an academic program that uses the language of violence prevention to push gun control.

And we can tell that because of the claim that we’re not a particularly violent nation.

See, for that to be true, we wouldn’t have a non-gun homicide rate higher than most other nations’ total homicide rates. Even if every homicide with a firearm were gone tomorrow, we’d still be one of, if not the most violent developed nations on the planet. Yet if one is realistic, you have to acknowledge that without firearms, some of those gun homicides would have been committed with some other weapon, driving up that rate to some degree or another, making the issue even more pronounced.

Don’t try to tell me the problem really is that we have guns.

Yet what’s interesting here is that by pushing the idea that our problem is that we have guns, people like Wintemute completely skirt the broader issue that he himself notes, namely that people support the idea of political violence.

It’s one thing to resist an oppressive government, but that should be everyone’s last resort. That shouldn’t become necessary until the government strips people of their rights almost entirely, and we’re not there nor are we particularly close to being there, Kamala Harris’ recent comments aside.

Further, he doesn’t even touch on the rhetoric that has surrounded Donald Trump for eight years now. It doesn’t get into how he’s “literally Hitler” and an “existential threat to Democracy” or how he’s going to herd entire segments of the American citizenry into extermination camps. 

Now, if no one actually believed that rhetoric, it wouldn’t be an issue, but a lot of people do. They take it as the literal truth, and while I get not liking the guy, what people are doing is taking the absolute worst fears they can imagine and projecting them onto the guy simply because they hate it. Yet that has the side effect of making any kind of assassination attempt seem like self-defense.

Our right to keep and bear arms isn’t the problem. Just look at the assassination of Shinzo Abe. Japan has gun control laws that would make the most fervent anti-gunner pause to reconsider, and yet it did nothing to stop an assassination. There are other examples, too.

So no, it’s not gun ownership that’s the problem. It’s people being idiots and fearmongering that’s the issue.