Where the Everyday Meets the Exceptional
Where the Everyday Meets the Exceptional
In America, even former Presidents aren't insulated from gun violence
By: Caroline E. Light, Michal Goldstein, Agatha V. Nyarko
On the morning of Saturday, July 13, a twenty-year-old purchased 50 rounds of ammunition at a local gun shop. Then he packed up his father’s legally purchased AR-style gun — the same kind of weapon used in many mass shootings — before driving from his home in Bethel Park to a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
That evening, former President Donald Trump joined the ranks of thousands of American concert-goers, grocery shoppers, worshippers, and school children — he became the target of an armed gunman’s bullet.
By the day’s end, two people lay dead from gunshot wounds, two were seriously injured, and the former President would be treated for a wound caused by a bullet that grazed his right ear. That the former president’s survival hinged on mere millimeters has not escaped notice. On video, Trump’s head shifts slightly to the right as he speaks. Moments later, the bullet grazes his ear, narrowly missing his skull. Without that shift and the Secret Service’s quick reaction, the shooter may have struck his target along with many more bystanders.
As the nation reels in the aftermath of Saturday’s assassination attempt, we cannot avoid the stark reality of our gun-saturated nation. When military-grade weapons are readily available to almost anyone who wants one, no one is safe from gun violence, even the most heavily protected citizens.
In theory, a political rally featuring a former president should be among the safest events to attend. All attendees must pass through metal detectors, and the Secret Service, acting in conjunction with local law enforcement, carefully secures the perimeter. Before Saturday’s event, police and Secret Service agents investigated every corner of the venue to eliminate possible threats. This painstaking process would have included a careful scouring of buildings and elevated areas outside of the event space. But they somehow neglected to secure the warehouse on which the gunman lay poised with his weapon, less than 500 feet away.
Some believe that the Secret Service failed their duties to protect the former President. The Secret Service, with their experienced team of snipers, should have been able to detect and eliminate any danger before former President Trump took the stage. But even if we chalk up their failures to human error, only a particularly lethal weapon could have made those errors so catastrophic.
The measures taken to protect civilians and the presidential candidate from harm were ultimately no match for the long range accuracy — between 400 and 600 feet — of a semi-automatic weapon designed with one purpose in mind: to end life as efficiently as possible.
In the wake of each gun tragedy, many understandably seek motives. What could compel a 20-year-old to take aim at the former president of the United States? As the FBI searches the gunman’s phone and interviews everyone who knew him, news outlets speculate on his political convictions and conspiracy theories ricochet all over.
Yet we must not let our efforts to understand why this instance of senseless violence occurred distract us from seeing how it could happen.
We may never know what drove this young man to violence or to attempt to kill the presumptive presidential candidate of the party he likely supported. We do know, however, that he had access to an especially lethal weapon. And we know that he could not have killed someone from 500 feet away without it.
The widespread availability of military-grade weapons, designed with elegant precision to extinguish life, ensures that anyone with an impulsive desire to inflict death and mayhem may carry out their goal, often with little advanced planning.
As our firearm technology improves, the ability to kill has less and less to do with intent and more to do with means.
When we think about this assassination attempt and the tragic loss of life, our most pressing concern is not determining exactly why the gunman fired his weapon. Instead, we should recognize that whatever motivated him to violence would have had no force without the weapon in his hand.
Many — including supporters of former President Trump — would like to believe that the only defense against this “bad guy with a gun” is a “good guy with a gun.” If this were true, then the presence of so many highly experienced, well-armed “good guys (and gals)” at the rally should have prevented the violence. But the devastating events we witnessed prove otherwise.
While attempted assassinations of major political figures may not be an everyday occurrence, senseless gun deaths unfortunately are. There is nothing particularly unique about a young white man using a firearm to kill.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this incident is not its singularity, but rather its continuity with a wider pattern of public gun violence.
Multiple shootings take place every single day in the United States. Though this incident is “special” because of its target and the higher level of security, it begs the same question as other fatal shootings: When high capacity military grade weapons are widely available to all who want them, is anyone truly safe?
Caroline Light is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Harvard’s Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press, 2017) provides a critical genealogy of our nation’s ideals of armed citizenship.
Michal Goldstein is a rising senior at Harvard University from Palo Alto, California. She studies English with a secondary in Psychology, and is working with Harvard Professor Caroline Light on a project investigating the individual self-defense justification for firearm possession and use, specifically the race and gender implications of armed self-defense.
Agatha Nyarko is a rising junior at Harvard University from New York City. She is concentrating in Social Studies, and is conducting research for Caroline Light on the intersection of self-defensive firearm justifications and domestic violence.
Great post. A lot of national news reports are focusing now on support for political violence, typically attributing it to partisanship, dehumanization of political rivals, and other attitudinal factors. There's not a lot attention to the weapons that make the violence possible. (I recently came across a pair of 2024 studies linking gun purchases and public carry to support for political violence. Maybe we can't say whether interest in owning guns drives support for political violence or vice versa, but they're clearly interrelated.)