The New Yorker:

After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, who can heal a country so threatened by menace, violence, and division?

By David Remnick

On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Robert F. Kennedy, who was pursuing the Democratic nomination for President, spoke to the Cleveland City Club about the “mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.”

In a mournful cadence, Kennedy told the crowd that a sniper is a coward, not a hero; that the “uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.” Violence, whether it is carried out by one man or a gang, he said, degrades an entire nation:

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire. . . . Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

On Saturday afternoon, a twenty-year-old man identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks positioned himself on a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, and attempted to murder former President Donald Trump, who was speaking at a rally of his supporters. From more than a hundred yards away, Crooks allegedly fired off a series of rounds from what has been described as an “AR-15-style” rifle. One bullet grazed Trump’s right ear, he said. Had the shooter’s aim been even infinitesimally more accurate, Trump would have been mortally wounded. As it was, he was left stunned and bleeding from his ear. Before the Secret Service could sweep him off the stage, Trump paused near the steps to pump his fist and, in defiance, mouthed the words, “Fight, fight.”

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