Political violence has “no place” here. History says otherwise.
Charlie Kirk. Melissa Hortman. Paul Pelosi. Steve Scalise. Gabby Giffords. The list stretches all the way back.
Political violence has no place here. We say it every time someone gets attacked. Then it happens again.
On September 10, 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. Leaders across the spectrum condemned it. The FBI is investigating. Details are still developing.
Three months earlier, Minnesota’s former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot to death in their home. The state’s governor called it a political assassination. The same night, State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were shot and survived. Minnesota House Democrats just chose a new leader to replace Hortman.
Reactions, then and now
Charlie Kirk’s killing drew loud and immediate condemnation from Republicans and Democrats, plus a wave of claims from some on the right blaming “the Left” before a motive was established. Former presidents and sitting leaders called for unity and restraint.
Hortman’s assassination got fast condemnation in Minnesota and in Washington, but parts of the right treated it as a springboard for conspiracy theories and cheap shots. Sen. Mike Lee amplified baseless claims about the shooter. Rep. Derrick Van Orden mocked Democrats days after the murders. That tone never fully corrected. The asymmetry is obvious if you put the coverage side by side.
Trump: two attempts in one year
Last year, there were two attempts on Donald Trump’s life. The first was the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13, 2024, where a rooftop shooter wounded Trump’s ear, killed an innocent bystander, and critically injured two others before agents killed the shooter. The FBI opened a domestic terror investigation.
Two months later, an armed suspect was arrested near Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. The case was treated as a separate attempt. Together, they marked the most serious targeting of a major candidate since 1981.
Paul Pelosi: an attack that became a punchline
On October 28, 2022, a man broke into the Pelosi home and fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer. The attacker had posted extremist content and asked, “Where is Nancy?” Yet some immediately turned it into a joke or a conspiracy: homophobic rumors, “false flag” claims, and memes. Elon Musk amplified one of the hoaxes, then deleted it. Some elected Republicans made light of it. This is how dehumanization works in practice.
This is not new
Saying “this has no place here” is a ritual. The record says it has always had a place here.
Four presidents were assassinated: Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1881, McKinley in 1901, and Kennedy in 1963. Reagan was shot and nearly died in 1981. Theodore Roosevelt took a bullet in 1912 and still finished his speech. Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill Truman at Blair House in 1950, killing a police officer. This is the American ledger.
Recent decades have not broken the pattern. In 2011, Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in Tucson; six people were murdered and 13 were wounded. In 2017, a gunman opened fire on Republicans at a congressional baseball practice, seriously wounding Steve Scalise. The federal classification and motive language around the Scalise shooting remains contested even now, but no one seriously disputes that it was political targeting.
Judges and their families are targets, too. In 2020, a gunman came to Judge Esther Salas’s home, killed her son, and shot her husband. That attack drove federal legislation to shield judges’ personal information.
And yes, we’ll add January 6th to this list. The target of the rioters was Democratic lawmakers and a Republican Vice President.
The mechanism: polarization vs. dehumanization
Polarization of ideas is not the problem. It is the point of politics. The break point is when opponents are stripped of their humanity, painted as subhuman, satanic, diseased, scum, or “vermin.” After that, the barrier to violence lowers. You see it in how people talk about “them,” and you see it in what becomes “funny” after someone is beaten with a hammer or shot on a stage. The record after Paul Pelosi’s attack is a case study. The real-time spin around Hortman’s assassination is another.
Today’s selective outrage
The murder of Charlie Kirk is abhorrent. So was Hortman’s. So were the attempts on Trump. If you only denounce one set and minimize the others, you are not opposing political violence. You are licensing it for your team. Right now, that double standard is visible in the different ways leaders and influencers handled Hortman’s killing and Kirk’s. The lesson is simple: condemn all of it, without caveat, before the next name gets added to the list.
The honest conclusion
“Political violence has no place here” is an aspiration, not a description. From the 19th century to this week, political violence has been part of American life. The question is whether leaders and their audiences can stop feeding it with dehumanizing rhetoric and selective outrage. History says we fail that test a lot.