Following the second assassination attempt in two months on President Donald Trump, gun control advocates say the incident highlights a dangerous political climate for deadly violence against public servants in a country where there are more guns than people.
A 58-year-old man who identified himself as Ryan Wesley Routh was arrested by authorities on Sunday after Secret Service agents found a rifle barrel in the trees at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the former president was playing golf. Routh appeared in federal court in Florida on Monday and was charged with federal gun crimes.
The incident came two months after a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee, seriously wounding two others and leaving the former president with a grazed ear.
“We live in dangerous times,” a Secret Service spokesman said of the attack.
Polls have shown growing support for political violence among Americans, and leaders of gun safety groups have blamed the widespread availability of firearms, in particular, for how deadly such incidents can be.
“Political violence does not reflect American values and has no place in our democracy, but once again, an individual armed with hatred and an assault weapon attempted to take the life of a former president,” said John Feinblatt, executive director of Everytown for Gun Safety. “Violence of any kind has no place in our country, and we must keep guns out of the hands of those hell-bent on dividing our political process and communities.”
Giffords, an organization founded by former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011, echoed this sentiment, saying on X: “We are relieved that former President Trump is safe after the FBI reported an assassination attempt in Florida. Gun violence has no place in America. Weak laws put us all at risk.”
Brady, an anti-gun violence group, similarly called on people to “condemn political violence and come together to address America’s gun violence crisis.”
Sen. Kamala Harris, in an interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists on Tuesday, renewed her accusations that authorities are investigating the incident as an assassination attempt against her Republican opponent.
“I got involved in this election and this campaign for many reasons, including fighting for democracy,” she said. “In a democracy, political violence has no place.”
At the start of the interview, she reiterated her support for an assault weapons ban and other policy interventions to reduce gun violence.
Experts say that while the rise in political violence is by no means unique to the United States, it has been particularly deadly here.
“There’s a myth that Americans are a particularly violent people, but that’s not the case,” said Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who has long studied the relationship between firearm ownership and political violence. “We have particularly high rates of fatal assault here, but it’s because we have a special level of access to firearms, and that changes the outcome.”
His team’s research found that Americans who bought guns after the COVID-19 pandemic unrest of 2020 or who regularly carry a loaded gun in public tend to be more susceptible to political violence. A similar, but less pronounced, pattern was found among owners of assault rifles, which have often been used in mass shootings and the assassination attempt on President Trump in Pennsylvania.
“Every day in the United States, thousands of armed people walk the streets who support the idea of and are willing to participate in political violence,” Wintemute said.
With less than 50 days until the election, experts worry that recent threats against Trump’s life could incite future violence, but that doesn’t have to be the case, said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow who studies political violence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
When violence is justified as a political tool, it risks getting out of control, unleashing a threat that looms over every ideology and public servant at every level, from presidential candidates to lower-level judges and election officials, she said.
But research suggests that leaders from across the political spectrum, including President Trump, whose increasingly threatening rhetoric has contributed to a toxic public atmosphere, could help stem the tide if they strongly condemned the violence and urged Americans to resolve their differences peacefully.
“Normalizing violence breeds more violence,” Kleinfeld said. “Unfortunately, no one normalizes violence more than Trump and his MAGA followers, but that’s no excuse to use against Trump. But Trump has the most power to stop it.”
Presidential candidate Trump continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him – a false claim that led his supporters to violently storm the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win. Trump has threatened to jail his political opponents and warned that there could be a “bloodbath” if he loses the election.
Trump has also attacked the judges and prosecutors handling several of the criminal cases against him, leading some of his supporters to call for their execution. Concerns over the safety of judges led to increased security for Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is handling the election interference case against Trump.
This week in Springfield, Ohio, bomb threats forced the evacuation and lockdown of schools, city halls and other government buildings after President Trump and other Republican lawmakers repeated a racist and false conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating pets.
“His supporters certainly listen to him, as evidenced by the call-and-response violence he has used on judges, witnesses and jurors,” she said. “So he can speak out to his supporters and say this has to stop.”
Federal investigators are still searching for clues about the shooter’s motive. Hours after the Florida shooting, Trump alleged, without providing evidence, that what authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt against him was sparked by “inflammatory rhetoric” from Democrats.
“I’m under attack because of what they’re saying and what they’re doing. I’m in a position to save our country and they’re destroying it from the inside and the outside,” Trump told Fox News Digital.
He went on to say that the president and vice president “want to destroy our country.”
“It’s called the enemy from within,” he said. “They are the real threat.”
Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, also denounced the Democrats’ rhetoric, saying the assassination attempt on the former president was “pretty strong evidence” that “the left has got to stop this crap.”
“I think the most important difference is that people on your team tried to kill Donald Trump twice,” Vance argued in a tweet responding to a post by conservative columnist David Frum, who has been critical of Trump.
Biden spoke at a conference of historically black colleges and universities in Philadelphia on Monday afternoon, offering a contrasting view to his predecessor.
“America has seen enough tragedies caused by an assassin’s bullet,” Biden said. “It doesn’t solve anything. It only divides our country. We must do everything in our power to prevent that, and we must never breathe life into it.”
Wintemute said his team just received the latest data as part of a multiyear study assessing Americans’ attitudes toward political violence. The survey showed that Americans’ support for and acceptance of political violence has remained unchanged since 2023, which Wintemute called “good news” given the turmoil of an election year.
In another encouraging sign, only 5% of Americans say they are very or extremely likely to join the military if a large-scale conflict breaks out. Of that minority, almost half say they would be willing to change their mind if encouraged to do so by a family member, and a quarter say they would listen to a friend.
The findings include a call to action for all Americans, not just public officials: Everyone has a role to play in de-escalating violence, Wintemute said.
“We really can’t stand by and watch a train wreck,” he said. “If there’s major political violence in this country, we’re all on that train and we’re all going off the cliff together.”
