More of the Same

For many in the ballroom at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night, the scene was painfully familiar. Shots fired, confusion and panic, and a sense that the normal order of things had been violently interrupted.
Political violence jolts the US once again - with a familiar response

This may be true, but for a lot of people who weren't in that ballroom, shots fired is the normal order of things. The United States is a pretty violent place, considering that it's not a third-world nation. Lethal force is often seen as a solution to problems, and not a problem in and of itself. While a lot of made of political violence, what's happening is that a segment of the American public that's normally shielded from the sort of violence that's an everyday occurrence in much of the country are starting to find that it's coming for them. Because more people are coming to the conclusion that some action or another is, in fact, a form of violence, and so violence in return is warranted.

While attempted assassinations often prompt yet another tiresome round of The Political Blame Game, the fact of the matter is that politics really has very little to do with it. It's easy to point to this or that bit of political rhetoric (often taken out of context) and claim that it's a driving force in the spread of attacks on people, but this is really only pandering to constituencies who want to see those not like them as willfully perverse. Because the United States doesn't look back on events like the American Revolution, or even the American Civil War, as tragic wastes of people's lives; they're seen as heroic, and necessary, undertakings. Many people in the American South have effectively retconned the whole history of the Civil War in service of that particular viewpoint.

As turning to violence starts to become less a trait of the poor, minorities and the generally marginalized and more a trait of Americans as a whole, I can understand how a certain level of hand-wringing becomes commonplace. But I can also understand why it doesn't do anything to arrest the shift. Because it doesn't do anything to either solve the problems that people are responding to, or to create conditions where the use of violence is seen as broadly disqualifying (as opposed to simply a cudgel with which to beat political rivals).