OPINION: The assassination attempt on Donald Trump will not affect the cult status that the AR-15 enjoys among the American right, David Smith writes in The Conversation.
The shooting that killed former President Donald Trump and three other rally attendees was just one of nearly 300 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.
Among the shocking news of the day was one sadly familiar fact: The shooter had used an AR-15-style rifle, a type of semi-automatic weapon that has been used in dozens of mass shootings since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The AR-15, despite its destructive power, exerts a powerful influence on American politics.
The NRA calls the AR-15 “America’s Rifle,” and in 2023, five Republican senators proposed a bill that would declare the AR-15 America’s “people’s gun.”
The AR-15 has acquired cult status among the American right, and has become a rebellious response to persistent attempts to ban it.
Since the Clinton-era assault weapons ban expired in 2004, the U.S. has never come close to restoring federal restrictions on semi-automatic rifles.
Will that change now that an AR-15 nearly took the life of former Republican president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump? It’s unlikely.
But past shootings of U.S. presidents have sparked some of the most significant gun control reforms in the country’s history.
1960s Assassinations and Gun Control
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 marked the beginning of a bitter debate about the need to curb the distribution of cheap firearms in the U.S. Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president with an Italian surplus rifle he had purchased from a magazine ad.
A few days after Kennedy’s death, Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut introduced a bill to ban mail-order sales of rifles. His original proposal never made it out of a Senate committee and faced opposition from the NRA.
However, President Lyndon Johnson continued to pressure Congress on the issue, and eventually gun control legislation was enacted in 1968.
It established a minimum age for purchasing guns, restricted interstate sales, and banned sales to felons, drug addicts, and those who are “mentally incompetent.”
Sadly, it took two more mass shootings for the bill to pass: the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, followed by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential election campaign that June, provided the final push for the bill in Congress.
At this point, gun control legislation was also partially supported by NRA Vice President Franklin Orth.
“I don’t see how any sane American who calls himself an American could object to putting into this bill the tools used to assassinate the president,” he said in testimony before a congressional committee in support of the mail-order ban.
Reagan assassination attempt and the Brady Act
The 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan is remembered today for the political boost it gave President Reagan and the perpetrator’s bizarre motive, but it also led to the longest-lasting gun control reforms in the past 40 years.
President Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, was shot in the head during an attack on the president and was left paralyzed.
His wife, Sarah Brady, became a leader in the gun control movement, and her organization fully supported the Brady Bill when it was first introduced in Congress in 1987.
The bill would have amended the 1968 Gun Control Act to require background checks and waiting periods for firearm purchases, two measures that may have prevented the Reagan massacre.
Despite President Reagan’s support in 1988 and 1991, the bill failed, largely due to the NRA’s radicalization into an unavoidable opponent of gun control, wielding considerable influence in Congress.
The Brady Act was finally passed in 1993 with the support of the Clinton Administration.
Since then, the law has been credited with reducing suicide rates and overall gun deaths among older Americans.
Reagan, along with former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford (who himself survived two assassination attempts), publicly supported Clinton’s 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which received near-unanimous support in the Senate but lapsed a decade later.
Why gun control measures are unlikely to be reinstated in the wake of the Trump shooting
Since the George W. Bush administration, Republicans have staunchly opposed nearly any form of national gun control.
While the NRA has lost much of the power it once had, especially over the Democratic Party, gun rights has become one of the signature battles in America’s culture wars.
It’s a key but unpopular issue for Republicans, who have opposed even modest gun control measures that are supported by large majorities of the public. Mindful of anything that could damage his chances of winning, Trump removed almost all references to guns or the Second Amendment from this year’s Republican platform.
If anyone could actually undermine Republican orthodoxy on guns, it would be Trump given his commanding position within the party at this point, but judging by his record as a former president and his current pledges, it’s highly unlikely he’d support Joe Biden’s call to renew the assault weapons ban.
Donald Trump made his first public appearance since the assassination attempt, entering to the cheers of the crowd.
Previous shootings of presidents have forced Americans to reconsider the role of guns in national life, but for Trump’s supporters, his survival could fit the argument in favor of gun control.
The mantra “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” is not a call to end gun violence; it’s a call to accept gun violence as normal and be on the winning side.
Fortunately, Americans were spared the truly horrifying spectacle that would have occurred had Trump been killed by a bullet.
Instead, Trump crafted a symbolic picture of survival and victory while his attacker was killed within seconds by Secret Service agents.The event was traumatic for some in attendance but quickly transformed into a victory to be celebrated for many Trump supporters.
For years, parts of the American right have described politics in terms of war.
The assassination attempt on President Trump likely convinced many of them that their enemies were truly dangerous, but that they were destined to win. “God protected President Trump,” Senator Marco Rubio tweeted minutes after the assassination attempt.
If that were the case, we wouldn’t need gun control.
David Smith is Associate Professor of American Politics and Foreign Policy at the Centre for American Studies, University of Sydney.
This article is reprinted from conversation Under Creative Commons license.
