Like school shootings, political violence is becoming part of life in the US
The statements of shock and condolences streamed in eerily, one after another, on Saturday after the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted murder of another lawmaker and his wife.
'Horrible news,' said Steve Scalise, a politician who was shot at a baseball game in 2017. 'Paul and I are heartbroken,' said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose husband was bludgeoned with a hammer in 2022. 'My family and I know the horror of a targeted shooting all too well,' said former politician Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head in 2011.
Still more came from Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania (arson, 2025), Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan (kidnapping plot, 2020) and President Donald Trump (two assassination attempts, 2024).
'Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,' the president said.
And yet, the expanding club of survivors of political violence seemed to stand as evidence to the contrary.
In the past three months alone, a man set fire to the Pennsylvania governor's residence while Shapiro and his family were asleep inside; another man gunned down a pair of workers from the Israeli Embassy outside an event in Washington; protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, were set on fire; and the Republican Party headquarters in New Mexico and a Tesla dealership near Albuquerque, New Mexico, were firebombed.
And those were just the incidents that resulted in death or destruction.
Against that backdrop, it might have been shocking, but it was not really so surprising, when Saturday morning, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their home, and a Democratic state senator, John A. Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, were shot and wounded.
Slowly but surely, political violence has moved from the fringes to an inescapable reality. Violent threats and even assassinations, attempted or successful, have become part of the political landscape — a steady undercurrent of American life.
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