The last couple of years have been rough when it comes to politically motivated violence. Not only do we have the assassination attempts, both against President Donald Trump, but also the successful assassinations of Charlie Kirk and Melissa Hortman(allegedly), we also have the countless examples of less extreme violence, such as the vandalism of Teslas and Tesla dealerships.
It's bad, to say the least.
It's been bad before, though. In the 1960s, the nation saw the assassinations of President Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.
And according to Julian E. Zelizer at Foreign Policy, President Lyndon Johnson's response was the only rational course of action.
Americans were once again confronted with political violence when a gunman attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month. The dinner is an annual event where politicians, reporters, and celebrities have gathered since 1921 in an uncomfortably cozy environment to temporarily forget their adversarial relations for an evening in black tie. With President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other senior administration officials gathered alongside some of the nation’s top journalists in a packed Washington Hilton ballroom, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen tried to force his way past the security checkpoint in what authorities have described as an assassination plot.
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In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress responded very differently to a wave of devastating assassinations that shook the nation throughout the decade. It had begun with the killing of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and continued with the murder of Malcolm X in February 1965. On April 4, 1968, an assassin shot Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee, and two months later, on June 5, Sirhan Sirhan killed New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, just minutes after Kennedy claimed victory in the California Democratic primary.
Johnson responded by pushing for gun control, the first serious effort on the matter since the 1930s. Unlike today, the political will existed to meet tragedy with law, and to at least attempt to confront the conditions that had allowed violence to take root.
Well, my question is, if Johnson's response was the right response to political violence in the 1960s, then that would suggest it worked as intended. If it worked as intended, though, why are we seeing political violence today?
"Oh, but it was limited," Zelizer goes on to argue, but what he's missing is that the latest attempt on Trump's life involved someone who got his guns in the most restrictive gun control environment in the entire country. He purchased all of them lawfully in California, a state with laws that would never be permitted at the national level, not just by the ordinary people of this country, but by the courts.
He expects Trump and the Republican Party to do just like Lyndon Johnson did and restrict the rights of people because the laws on the books were insufficient to stop people from getting guns in the first place, but there's no law in the universe that would have stopped most of the assassins and would-be assassins that have popped up in the last few years.
Only one of them was prohibited from buying a firearm, and he still got a gun just the same.
We've seen AR-15s, MilSurp bolt-action rifles, and pump-action shotguns used to try to take people's lives. So what would be banned? What would be restricted? What steps could be taken to prevent another attempt on someone's life due to politics?
The answer is nothing.
Trump isn't pushing gun control because there's not a gun-control solution to the problem. The "conditions that had allowed violence to take root" aren't the access to firearms, but the insane rhetoric that demonizes literally everyone who refuses to agree with the most extreme branches of the left. It's the idea that President Trump is an existential threat to the nation and to democracy, that he will somehow murder millions of Americans or some other group simply because they aren't his people, despite a complete lack of evidence supporting the claim.
Gun control won't address those issues.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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