The murder case against former President Trump felt familiar in a uniquely American way at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.
The gunman used an AR-style rifle to target the crowd away from the rooftop, echoing the 2017 mass shooting when a gunman opened fire on a music festival from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel.
Law enforcement said the gunman, who was 20 years old, got the gun from his home — like so many other young shooters who have left a trail of blood in schools, churches, bars and other community gathering places across the country.
“Time and time again, our communities are rocked by acts of gun violence that invade the places where we are supposed to be safe,” said Angela Ferrer-Zabala, executive director of the gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action. “But they are the result of our nation’s weak gun laws and pervasive gun culture—laws that allow hatred to be armed and easily take lives. “
America’s vast gun divide was once again sharp on Sunday, but little changed, amid condemnations of political violence from leaders of both parties and ordinary Americans. Despite the near-shooting of their presidential candidate, leading Republicans have stopped short of publicly calling on the party to soften its ardent support for gun rights.
Still, the shooting provides a new and particularly powerful example of another American institution — this time the electoral process — falling victim to the massive proliferation of modern guns. That could be important as courts across the country and in California continue to weigh when, where and why such weapons might be restricted, if at all.
A federal court is currently considering a challenge to a California law that bans the gun used by accused shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa. an AR-style rifle; another bans gun ownership by people Crooks’ age and younger; and a third bans people from carrying firearms into a range of “sensitive” locations, including public gatherings and special events.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was shot and a man was removed from the stands by state police in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.
(Rebecca Drock/AFP Getty Images)
Like the Las Vegas shooting in which a gunman killed nearly 60 people and injured hundreds more, Saturday’s attack raises questions about how these sensitive locations are defined and how to determine whether a certain type of gun or accessory is unusual. Dangerous enough to fall outside Second Amendment protections, legal experts say.
Such questions have become even more important following a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association. v. Bruin, the high court said that most gun laws are legal only if they are rooted in the nation’s history and traditions, or sufficiently similar to certain historical laws.
In October, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez in San Diego, citing the high court’s Bruen ruling, ruled that California’s ban on the AR-style weapons used Saturday was unconstitutional because it had no historical basis and the assault rifles are very common and not particularly dangerous.
“Like the bowie knife commonly carried by citizens and soldiers in the 1800s,” Benitez wrote at the outset of his decision, “‘assault weapons’ are dangerous but useful.”
Of course, an assault rifle is far more dangerous than a Bowie knife and has a completely different range of damage. For example, federal authorities said Crooks shot Trump from “an elevated position outside the rally grounds” — The Washington Post estimated that it was about 430 feet from where Trump was speaking.
Darrell AH Miller, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who studies the Second Amendment, said there is a “pretty well-established” legal tradition declaring political rallies and other election events as sensitive places where guns can be banned.
However, he and other experts said Saturday’s shooting raised new questions about the scope of such and other similar restrictions, as well as the nature of “sensitive areas” and how their borders can and should be defined.
“In terms of the sensitive areas doctrine that’s being developed right now, there may be a need to look at changes in gun technology over the last 200 years,” Miller said in an interview Sunday.
Legal experts say the shooting may also help gun control advocates argue that such high-powered, long-range weapons are uniquely dangerous even when owned in common, making bans on them in California and elsewhere inconsistent with Other long-term bans have been consistent with particularly dangerous weapons, such as machine guns.
Steve Gordon, a retired officer and sniper with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Weapons Team, said that despite the distance, hitting Trump’s shot wasn’t particularly difficult with a little training.
Gordon told The Times: “This type of rifle is standard issue for the police/military and it is not difficult to shoot with this weapon system.”
Congressional Republicans and the Biden administration say there will be a thorough investigation into Saturday’s shooting, including determining whether different steps could have been taken to prevent it. What results these investigations might yield is unclear.
Trump’s shooting could also be cited as another data point — a historic one — supporting laws such as California’s that ban the sale of such weapons to those under 21, regardless of whether Crooks personally purchased them. got this weapon.
Gun control advocates could use more evidence of the unique threat high-powered, long-range weapons pose in the hands of unstable young people, especially given the uphill battle they face in defending gun restrictions after Bruin.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that domestic abusers can be barred from owning guns, but has ruled against gun laws in other cases. Just last month, the high court overturned a federal ban on bump stocks — accessories that allow shooters to fire bullets faster and were used in the Vegas shooting.
Beyond the courts, Trump’s shooting has entered the national gun debate in a major way.
For example, when the National Rifle Assn. Shannon Watts, co-founder of Moms Demand Action and the affiliate group Everytown, issued a pointed rebuttal in a post on social media platform X praying for Trump, law enforcement and others at the rally. Cue the NRA’s hypocrisy.
“The NRA’s extremist agenda ensures that a 20-year-old would-be assassin has access to weapons of war, making it impossible for even highly trained security forces to protect anyone — from schoolchildren to a former president,” Watts wrote. “
She then noted that in recent years, such weapons have been used to kill a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and schools across the country, from Santa Fe, N.M., to Santa Fe, Texas. Vardy) kills people.
Others have made similar connections.
“If you keep talking about assassination attempts, you don’t dare tell the kids who survived school shootings and their families ‘just forget it,'” wrote David Hogg Survivors of a shooting that killed 17 people and injured 17 others.
Hogg was apparently referring to Trump’s comments earlier this year about the need to “get over” the Iowa school shootings, which were roundly condemned by gun control advocates and survivors.
Hogg wrote that what happened on Saturday was “unacceptable,” but so were “what happens every day to kids who are not president and can’t survive.”
era Staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this Report.
