But with the recent attempt on former President Donald Trump's life, many folks are now confronting the harsh reality of this type of political violence. You see, it seems there's apparently a growing trend of assassination attempts throughout the world.

On Saturday, former U.S. President Donald Trump became the latest major political figure worldwide to face an assassination attempt, in an incident that experts say may reflect a broader global pattern of increasing threats and violence against politicians.

In recent years, for example, both Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan have survived being shot (Fico in May this year and Khan in November 2022), while then-Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner narrowly escaped a shooting attempt in 2022 when the gunman’s pistol jammed. South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung was stabbed in January, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed in 2018. And assassinations claimed the lives of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (in 2022) and British politicians Jo Cox (in 2016) and David Amess (in 2021).

“We seem to be seeing that assassinations are on the rise now,” said Jacob Ware, a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and the co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, although he noted that he was drawing on anecdotal evidence. 

“Politicians and political figures are finding themselves in the crosshairs, and the people are determining that the ballot box and elections are no longer the best way to exercise political grievances,” Ware said.

...

“The mistrust and distrust of government is so great that it leads to almost the dehumanization of political figures,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and the other co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. “That’s also contributed to this demonization of individuals that can, in the minds of certainly a minority of Americans, incite violence.”

Two recent examples are incidents involving former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who were the targets of failed abduction and assassination plots, respectively; in the Pelosi case, though the former speaker avoided the attack, her husband was brutally assaulted with a hammer. And in 2020, the FBI announced that it had arrested more than a dozen people in connection with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for treason; nine people were ultimately convicted or pleaded guilty in the plot, and five were acquitted.

Beyond that, we've seen an uptick in politically-motivated violence in nations like Pakistan and Mexico.

Of course, for many of us, that's to be expected. Mexico is pretty much a failed state at this point and Pakistan has never been a symbol of stability, either, though it may look like one compared to some of its neighbors.

I find the writer's use of Ware as more than a little problematic because he's got a pronounced bias, but in this case, he's not particularly wrong. Politicians and political figures are finding themselves as the target, and this is an incredibly problematic approach. Not mentioned here is the attack on then-Rep. Gabby Giffords. While the anti-gun response by Giffords and her husband, Sen. Mark Kelly is something most of us would rather focus on with regard to Giffords herself, it was still an assassination attempt.

But the question is, why?

Why is this happening and why did it happen on Saturday? What is it about people that we're suddenly willing to murder people because we disagree with them?

I'm not stupid. I know this is a thing. I'm a small fish in this pond and I do what I can to protect myself from such an individual, so I'm assuming many others do as well that are much bigger fish, but why should we need to? I get that someone like Trump is so high-profile that every crazy in the nation is going to know who he is, meaning that if even .001 percent of the population wants him dead--and it seems like a lot more, based on some of the responses I've seen--he's going to be targeted, but why some of these other figures?

There's a lot of speculation, and the nature of political rhetoric in this country certainly isn't helping by any stretch of the imagination, but there aren't any real hard answers.

Yet if this is growing throughout the world, then we've got a big problem. That degree of instability isn't good for anyone.

We're just lucky the turdnugget who took a shot at Trump missed.