“Lock her up, lock her up!” went one loud chant about Hillary Clinton at ex-President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies. During the same events and in later election seasons, Trump also encouraged violence by his supporters against hecklers, sometimes promising to fund their defense if they should be criminally charged for their acts.
Now the Iwo Jima-like Associated Press photograph of a bloodied and heroic-looking Trump surrounded by Secret Service agents with an American flag flying above has the potential to be used as campaign fodder by him and his opponents.
Trump has not merely joined the long list of victims of American political violence, stretching from Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln to James Garfield to William McKinley to gangster Al Capone to John Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan and Gabby Giffords. Unlike any others, he is in a way a victim of his own policies.
Long an ally of the National Rifle Association’s perpetual campaign to overturn any gun-control law passed anywhere in America, Trump was wounded by what the FBI calls an “AR-15-style” weapon. The shooter nicked the ex-president’s right ear, bloodying his face. That shot missed killing him by only an inch or less.
Meanwhile, the three justices Trump placed on the U.S. Supreme Court have unanimously nixed almost every gun-control law they’ve encountered, a prominent exception coming this past spring when the court refused to take up an anti-assault weapon law in Maryland, not far from the Butler, Pennsylvania, political rally where Trump was shot.
As this summer began, though, the San Francisco-based Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence reported that Pennsylvania has no law prohibiting transfer or possession of assault weapons. This one belonged to the shooter’s father.
So attempted assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, from nearby Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, taking his dad’s assault gun seems likely to have been legal. There’s no doubt he shot Trump and blasted other bullets, killing one man and wounding two others from a rooftop near the rally site.
Had he wanted to get his own AR-15, he could have gotten one legally under Pennsylvania laws allowing purchase of long guns by almost anyone older than 18. Republicans in Pennsylvania and most other states steadily resist toughening those laws to make them like the ones forbidding handgun purchases in 22 states by those younger than 21.
Pennsylvania also has no minimum age to buy long guns from unlicensed sellers. No permit is needed before buying automatic rifles, nor is training afterward. The state’s GOP-controlled state senate has thwarted efforts to fix this.
Republicans immediately after the Trump shooting blamed President Biden for his metaphorical remark the other day suggesting it was time again for Democrats to “put Trump in the bull’s-eye,” rather than merely resisting calls that Biden stand down after his impaired June 27 debate performance with Trump. The GOP can certainly look in any mirror, though, to see who has consistently furthered the legal climate surrounding the attempt on Trump’s life.
Similar shootings are also possible in California under a 2021 decision from San Diego federal Judge Roger Benitez, a George W. Bush appointee whose 79-page opinion ruled this state’s controls on semi-automatic rifle ownership unconstitutional.
About that ruling, Gov. Gavin Newsom last year said “It’s time to wake up. Unless we enshrine a right to safety in the Constitution, we are at the mercy of ideologues like Judge Benitez. All of our gun safety laws that are proven to save lives are at risk.”
Newsom’s effort to create a constitutional amendment to limit gun ownership and sales of assault weapons has gotten little traction, though, even in other Democatic-controlled states like New York and Illinois.
Partly because Trump survived the attempt on his life and shouted “Fight, fight” before some Secret Service bodyguards took him from the rally stage while others fatally shot would-be assassin Crooks, that much will change is unlikeley. Nevertheless, the reality is Trump is at least in part the latest victim of his own rhetoric and policies.
Email Thomas Elias at [email protected], and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.