By Ken Reid
“Political violence” reared its ugly head in the Saturday shooting deaths of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the wounding of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife – all of them shot at their respective homes outside Minneapolis.
Shooting any human being and killing them is heinous, but being a former elected office holder myself, who got a few death threats in my 10 years serving Loudoun County, VA, these shooting incensed me because I understand what office holders have to deal with in their daily lives – which the news media and social media never seem to care about until there is a tragedy.
As of this writing, we don’t know the motive of the suspect Vance Boelter, who was captured late Sunday. I already see social media posts from conservatives saying he must have been a liberal because there were “No Kings” fliers in his car, and that he was appointed to a state commission by two Democrat governors. Liberal media are reporting he had materials in the car he ditched indicating he was a right winger – another example of how we need to “tone down the rhetoric” – as if the Left is not guilty of this.
Both views miss the point. This is just another continuing pattern of political violence in this nation and it’s broader and bigger than the recent killings of Israeli embassy staffers in DC, or attempted burning of 15 Jewish marchers for the hostages in Boulder, CO.
Professor Robert Pape, who studies political violence at the University of Chicago, told CNN’s Michael Smerconish on a podcast June 2: “We have become a tinderbox of a nation and we find volatile individuals motivated by events that happen in the world, and their attack will be supported by the community, but also motivated by the feeling there is no peaceful way to express their outrage.”
