Guns and Politics in America

Political rhetoric and firearms driving a new era of violence

Charlie Kirk was offered a deal, and he took it. Twenty minutes into defending his position that gun deaths are an acceptable price for the Second Amendment, a bullet found his throat at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.

He was 31. Back in April 2023, he had called this trade-off a prudent deal.

His shirt read FREEDOM. The banner above promised an American Comeback. He was mid-sentence, dissecting mass shooter statistics, when the shot landed. Moments earlier, a crowd of roughly 3,000 had cheered a line about too many transgender mass shooters.

Then came another entry in America’s accelerating ledger of political violence.

First shock, then spin. President Trump labeled Kirk a martyr for truth and freedom and blamed the radical left. Missing was any reflection on years of dehumanizing language such as fight like hell, vermin, animals, that built a permission structure for exactly this climate.

Selective outrage isn’t leadership. It tells a hyper-motivated minority which violence merits grief and which to dismiss as probably just a whack job.

Overall violent crime eased in 2024, with the national homicide rate near a generational low at roughly 4.6 per 100,000. Political violence moved the other direction. The U.S. Capitol Police opened 9,474 threat assessments in 2024, more than double 2017 and the second-highest total on record.

Outside Washington, the swamp of intimidation is real. Large shares of state and local officials report threats. Experienced election administrators are quitting in swing counties. Governance gets hollowed out from the edges.

The mode of violence shifted too. Fewer organized militias. More lone actors and loosely connected vigilantes. This is the social-media model: constant rhetorical voltage from elites, endless memetic reinforcement, and then a stochastic outcome. One person, somewhere, acts. No chain of command required.

In 2024, about 26% of Americans said violence can be justified to advance at least one political goal, statistically unchanged from 2023. The pool isn’t expanding. The activation energy dropped.

The victims span parties. A Republican president took a bullet graze in July 2024 and faced another armed would-be assassin two months later. A Democratic governor’s residence was torched in April 2025. In June, a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were murdered; investigators found a hit list of 45 Democrats. In October 2022, a man marinated in conspiracies broke into the Pelosi home and shattered a skull with a hammer. Then came Orem.

Americans now describe the out-party not as wrong but as immoral and unintelligent. Eight in ten say the sides can’t even agree on basic facts. Different media diets attach different meanings to the same words.

Call immigrants an infestation, and some fraction will hear a call for exterminators. The legal bar for direct incitement is high; the political standard for responsibility is not. Leaders know their words land inside echo chambers that amplify moral permission cues.

The country is uniquely armed. The courts have settled the individual-right reading of the Second Amendment for now, alongside presumptively lawful limits. Inside that framework, the policy menu—universal background checks, Extreme Risk Protection Orders, targeted disarmament of demonstrably dangerous individuals—is not radical. The radical posture is accepting a permanent background risk of political assassination as the price of identity.

Media incentives pour fuel on the fire. Every attack becomes content. Partisan outlets package violence as proof-of-enemy, not proof-of-problem. The base stays amped; engagement charts point up and to the right. A governor’s home burns, a lawmaker’s family is attacked, a campus becomes a crime scene, and half the country mainlines whataboutism while the other half drafts a fundraising email.

There’s a reason most Americans say politics leaves them exhausted. The exhausted check out. The radicals don’t.

Words matter because people listen. Some of those people carry guns to the places the words point to. Pretending speech exists in a vacuum is childish. Pretending the glut of firearms doesn’t change outcomes is a dangerous fantasy.

The country is choosing, by decision or by drift, to lower the temperature or to run with the fire. The current trajectory points to the fire.