Charlie Kirk’s assassination highlights the rise in US political violence

The assassination of Charlie Kirk stunned first the audience at Utah Valley University, where he was shot while speaking Sept. 10, and then the country, as footage of his killing quickly spread. For many Americans, the conservative influencer’s death crystallized a growing fear: The United States is experiencing more and more political violence. Kirk, 31, had the ear of both everyday Americans and the most powerful people in the United States. He founded Turning Point USA, a conservative organization focused on young people, when he was 18. Until he was fatally shot in the neck during a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University, Kirk was close to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.Kirk’s assassination followed numerous recent instances of political violence. In 2025 alone, Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were fatally shot; an arsonist set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s residence with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family inside; an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer was shot and injured outside a detention facility in Texas; the New Mexico Republican Party headquarters was set on fire; and a shooter attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters.In 2024, Trump himself was the target of two assassination attempts . Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative recorded over 600 incidents of threats and harassment against local officials that year — a 74% increase from 2022. “In under a decade, violence has become a shockingly regular feature of American political life,” University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape wrote in “Foreign Affairs.” “Support for political violence has gone mainstream. … Political trends do not move in straight lines, and predicting the future can be a fool’s errand. But it is safe to say that the United States has a rough road ahead.”Political violence is hardly unprecedented in the United States. In fact, the country has “a long, dark history” of violence that has “struck the highest level of American politics,” said Kevin Boyle, a Northwestern University historian.“Over a third of the presidents in the 20th century experienced assassination attempts, and two of them were killed,” Boyle said. Activists were also assaulted and killed. During the Jim Crow era, in the first half of the 20th century, ordinary citizens, especially Black Americans, were regularly lynched. But historians say the closest analogue to today’s uptick in political violence is the 1960s and 1970s, when President John F. Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy and George Wallace were shot. Only Wallace survived.While the perpetrators often had mental health issues, they seemed to have been shaped by the heated political times that seemed to polarize the population, said Kevin M. Schultz, a University of Illinois-Chicago historian.Now, Americans are quick to excuse actions and speech that were once taboo, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist at Georgetown University, said. Luigi Mangione, charged in the December killing of UnitedHealthCare executive Brian Thompson “has become a folk hero,” Hoffman said. A musical about Mangione that’s now in theaters is selling out. And elsewhere in the United States, Hoffman said, “the flags of terrorist organizations are a regular fixture at demonstrations and protests.”Today’s political and rhetorical landscape is intensely polarized and fueled by anger, distrust and conspiracy theories. It’s easier to target your political opponents for violence if you see them as “enemies of the nation,” Boyle said.Where does this enmity come from? Experts point to several sources, including social media, which exacerbated the high-voltage talk that had already existed for two decades in talk radio and cable news and “made it possible for violent rhetoric to reach vast numbers of people,” Boyle said.The anonymity of social media also enables people to speak without personal consequence, while algorithms amplify even the most extreme voices, “leading politicians to embrace positions far more extreme than most Americans seek,” Schultz said.American voters are actually less ideologically polarized than the fever-pitch rhetoric they consume suggests, according to Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.“Most partisans hold major misbeliefs about the other party’s preferences that lead them to think there is far less shared policy belief,” Kleinfeld has written . “This perception gap is highest among progressive activists, followed closely by extreme conservatives. In other words, the people who are most involved in civic and political life hold the least accurate views of the other side’s beliefs.”And while the 1960s and 1970s might be our best analogue for the violence happening today, there are some key differences. Notably, political violence has become mainstream. “Most mainstream politicians in that era, outside of the Jim Crow south, avoided violent rhetoric,” Boyle said. “That’s no longer the case.”Another important factor is the availability of guns.Kirk was among about a dozen people killed by guns Sept. 10, according to the Gun Violence Archive . In 2023, nearly 47,000 people died of gun violence and about 38% were homicides.“It’s a terrible thing to hate your political opponents, but the ready availability of guns makes it easier for people to act on their hatred,” Boyle said.Meanwhile, the underfunding of mental health care has let dangerous people act without being stopped. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, Trump and other conservatives blamed the left for political violence.“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said in a video message .“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”“The Left is the party of murder,” tech entrepreneur Elon Musk said on X.But recent political violence has affected both Democrats and Republicans.In addition to Kirk’s assassination and the attempts on Trump’s life, Republicans were targeted in a mass shooting at a congressional baseball practice in 2017. Democrats were targeted in the 2011 shooting of then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz.; a 2022 attack on the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif.; and the attacks on Hortman and Shapiro in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, respectively.And on Jan. 6, 2021 , the U.S. Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters who falsely claimed Democrats had stolen the 2020 election. When Trump won back the White House four years later, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of everyone who had been charged in the attack.In 2023, Reuters identified about 200 more instances of political violence since Jan. 6, 2021.There’s a ripple effect. As political violence rises, Kleinfeld said, it will affect everyone, regardless of political party. “The more people justify violence from their side of the aisle, the more unhinged, aggressive people will commit violence from that side,” Kleinfeld said. “And the more that will justify the other side in doing the same.”

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