America founded on blood but denies violent streak

Donald Trump appears to inspire terrible fantasies in the hearts of men who dislike him. The United States Secret Service on Sunday said it had foiled an “apparent assassination attempt’ in Florida on the Republican party’s candidate for president in the November 5 elections.

It was yet another episode of life in a notoriously violent society. But the reactions of US political leaders to the latest high-profile gun incident demonstrated again that Americans live in constant denial about this cultural essence. It’s almost as if everyone wants to wish away their history and their reality – that the US was founded on blood spilled by the gun and citizens swear by the gun.

Consider, for example, the response from the current occupiers of the White House. It was as predictable as it was banal. Of course, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were “relieved” to be told that Trump was safe. Harris, Trump’s Democratic rival in the November presidential election, wrote on X: “Violence has no place in America.”

Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz echoed Harris, posting on X that he and his wife were “glad” to hear that Trump was safe. He also repeated Harris’s line almost to the word, “Violence has no place in our country”, adding, “It’s not who we are as a nation”.But that’s a bit disingenuous. Four sitting US presidents were assassinated between 1835 and 2024; three were shot but survived; three were involved in shootings but emerged unscathed as people around them were killed or injured; and four were unharmed but the shooters were killed. Numerous lesser politicians have been assassinated or hurt in attempts on their lives.

The long history of violence is undeniable – from land-hungry European settlers denuding the landscape of its native population starting in the late 1400s to the lynchings or extrajudicial killings of African slaves and their descendants in the American South in the 19th and 20th centuries that ended only in the 1960s.

These days, the US is known around the world as much for its violence-imbued cultural exports as for mass shootings. Data shows that there had been 390 such shootings by the end of the first week of September, when a 14-year-old boy shot dead two students and two teachers at a high school in the southeastern state of Georgia.

If you add police shootings, defensive use of firearms, unintentional shootings, murders and suicides, the number of annual gun-related deaths in the US is staggering – more than 40,000 in 2023.

In the US, guns and citizenship go hand in hand. The obsession with firearms runs deep. I saw this firsthand. One occasion from several years ago still stands out for me. As a newcomer in “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, a generous co-worker invited a bunch of us to his house for a Thanksgiving Day dinner.I sat at a long oval table in the dining hall. Across from me was a gun rack encased in a wooden box with five rifles and three pistols of various kinds. I had never been so close to such a dangerous arsenal. As we gorged on turkey, sausages and beer, the weapons lay there, unspoken of, silent witnesses to this unusual gathering of dark-skinned men from Africa with their white host and his family.

What were the guns for? Did the man need such a large armoury? We didn’t ask. But you don’t buy a weapon if you have no intention of using it.

The incident in Florida was the second publicised assassination attempt against Trump in two months, after a bullet from an assailant pierced his right ear at a political rally in Pennsylvania on July 13. Who knows what another Trump hater is planning? The November 5 election cannot come soon enough.

— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief of the Nairobi Law Monthly and Nairobi Business Monthly-