TORONTO – Saturday’s shooting at a Donald Trump Campaign rally should be roundly condemned, as it has been, for several reasons. 

First, because in a modern, civilized, advanced, progressive, free, democratic society, the shooting should always be condemned as a deplorable manifestation of our collective failure to agree to a moral compass of what is a standard for us all.

Second, someone was killed, two others injured – irrespective of the “target” – and the alleged shooter was himself killed by “security agents”. Last year, more than 40,000 people in the USA were either killed or injured because of gun-related violence.
(see Gun Violence by the Numbers in 2023, By Chip Brownlee, The Trace, Dec 31, 2023)

Third, the commentary in the media immediately following the incident was more reflective of the finger-pointing partisanship that afflicts the mainstream media today than it was a serious analysis of an event being videotaped live. Every media outlet had the same “feed”, even Canada’s CBC and Italy’s RAI.

From the perspective of this observer, and with respect to CNN and CBC, the most important issue once Trump “hit the floor” should have been who is hurt, who caused the damage and to what stage in the investigation of the source of the shooting the “response team” had progressed. Safety and protection from further damage, for me, took precedence over vacuous meanderings of the “experts” assembled to pontificate on the merits of the “partisan rhetoric that motivates” violent behaviour.

It mattered little to me that some panelists asserted the obvious: “violent language begets violent behaviour” – in Italian, the expression is they discovered hot water. Or that, without knowing the shooter’s motives or his target, the motivations all stem from adherence to alt-Right or Extreme Left ideology. It is difficult to tell them apart: they are both toxic and intolerant. But two people are now dead.

In fact, RAI and Italy’s la Repubblica seemed to have scooped the North American Press and Media, including CNN, in informing their audience and readers of the fact that the “alleged sniper” had been killed.

The investigation has begun but the appropriate authorities have yet to determine whether this was a President Kennedy-style assassination attempt, November 22, 1963, and that the target was a Presidential candidate. It seems likely that the response team went immediately into “shoot first and ask questions later” mode.

No matter the outcome, the discussion on the objectives and goals of the Presidential election campaign, will take on a different dimension from this point on. I suspect the same may happen in the Canadian electoral environment that is emerging.

In the pic above, the place where Trump was and the position of the sniper just outside the controlled perimeter of the rally (photo credit Washington Post/Bing)