The day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk used to be shot and killed whilst talking at Utah Valley College, commentators repeated a well-known chorus: “This isn’t who we are as Americans.”
Others in a similar fashion weighed in. Whoopi Goldberg on “The View” declared that American citizens clear up political disagreements peacefully: “This is not the way we do it.”
But different terrible episodes come straight away to thoughts: President John F. Kennedy used to be shot and killed on Nov. 22, 1963. Extra not too long ago, on June 14, 2025, Melissa Hortman, speaker emerita of the Minnesota Area of Representatives, used to be shot and killed at her house, together with her husband and their golden retriever.
As a historian of the early republic, I consider that seeing this violence in The usa as distinct “episodes” is unsuitable.
As an alternative, they mirror a recurrent trend.
American politics has lengthy customized its violence. Again and again, historical past’s advance has been speculated to rely on silencing or destroying a unmarried determine – the rival who turns into without equal, despicable foe.
Therefore, to say that such shootings betray “who we are” is to omit that the U.S. used to be based upon – and has lengthy been sustained via – this very type of political violence.
First girl Jacqueline Kennedy leans over to lend a hand her husband, John F. Kennedy, simply after he’s shot in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963.
Bettman/Getty Pictures
Progressive violence as political theater
The years of the American Revolution have been incubated in violence. One abominable follow used on political adversaries used to be tarring and feathering. It used to be a punishment imported from Europe and popularized via the Sons of Liberty within the past due 1760s, Colonial activists who resisted British rule.
In seaport cities corresponding to Boston and New York, mobs stripped political enemies, in most cases suspected loyalists – supporters of British rule – or officers representing the king, smeared them with sizzling tar, rolled them in feathers, and paraded them throughout the streets.
The consequences on our bodies have been devastating. Because the tar used to be peeled away, flesh got here off in strips. Other folks would continue to exist the punishment, however they might lift the scars for the remainder of their existence.
By way of the past due 1770s, the Revolution in what’s referred to as the Heart Colonies had change into a brutal civil battle. In New York and New Jersey, patriot militias, loyalist partisans and British regulars raided throughout county strains, focused on farms and neighbors. When patriot forces captured loyalist irregulars – frequently known as “Tories” or “refugees” – they often handled them now not as prisoners of battle however as traitors, executing them all of a sudden, in most cases via putting.
In September 1779, six loyalists have been stuck close to Hackensack, New Jersey. They have been hanged with out trial via patriot defense force. In a similar fashion, in October 1779, two suspected Tory spies captured within the Hudson Highlands have been shot at the spot, their execution justified as punishment for treason.
To patriots, those killings have been deterrence; to loyalists, they have been homicide. Both approach, they have been unmistakably political, getting rid of enemies whose “crime” used to be allegiance to the unsuitable aspect.
In 1798, Henry Brockholst Livingston – later a U.S. Splendid Court docket justice – killed James Jones in a duel. It didn’t have an effect on his profession.
US Splendid Court docket
Pistols at break of day: Dueling as politics
Even after independence, the workings of American politics remained grounded in a common sense of violence towards adversaries.
For nationwide leaders, the pistol duel used to be now not near to honor. It normalized a political tradition the place gunfire itself used to be handled as a part of the talk.
Essentially the most well-known duel, in fact, used to be Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton in 1804. However rankings of lesser-known confrontations dotted the last decade earlier than it.
In 1798, Henry Brockholst Livingston – later a U.S. Splendid Court docket justice – killed James Jones in a duel. Some distance from discredited, he used to be deemed to have acted honorably. Within the early republic, even murder might be absorbed into politics when cloaked in ritual. Sarcastically, Livingston had survived an assassination strive in 1785.
In 1802, every other shameful spectacle spread out: New York Democratic-Republicans DeWitt Clinton and John Swartwout confronted off in Weehawken, New Jersey. They fired no less than 5 rounds earlier than their seconds intervened, leaving each males wounded. On this case, the conflict had not anything to do with political idea; Clinton and Swartwout have been Republicans. It used to be a patronage squabble that also erupted into gunfire, appearing how normalized armed violence used to be in settling disputes.
Gun tradition and its growth
One of the vital matching pair of derringer pistols utilized by John Wilkes Sales space within the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
Bob Grieser/Los Angeles Instances by the use of Getty Pictures
It’s tempting to push aside political violence as a leftover from some “primitive” or “frontier” level of American historical past, when politicians and their supporters supposedly lacked restraint or upper ethical requirements. However that isn’t the case.
From earlier than the Revolution onward, bodily punishment and even killing have been tactics to implement belonging, to mark the boundary between insiders and outsiders, and to come to a decision who had the fitting to manipulate.
Violence hasn’t ever been a distortion in American politics. It’s been one among its habitual options, now not an aberration however a continual drive, harmful and but oddly ingenious, generating new obstacles and new regimes.
The dynamic simplest deepened as gun possession expanded. Within the nineteenth century, business fingers manufacturing and competitive federal contracts put extra guns into circulate. The rituals of punishing the ones with the unsuitable allegiance now discovered expression within the heavily produced revolver and later within the automated rifle.
Those extra fashionable firearms changed into now not simplest sensible equipment of battle, crime or self-defense however symbolic items in their very own proper. They embodied authority, carried cultural that means and gave their holders the sense that legitimacy itself might be claimed on the barrel of a gun.
That’s why the word “This isn’t who we are” rings false. Political violence has at all times been a part of The usa’s tale, now not a passing anomaly, and now not an episode.
To disclaim it’s to go away American citizens defenseless towards it. Most effective via going through this historical past head-on can American citizens start to consider a politics now not outlined via the gun.
