Is this what happens when you dedicate your lives to stopping gun regulation, while simultaneously making literal calls for political violence? Feels like every republican shocked by gun violence against them is in serious leopards-ate-my-face-mode. I don’t have an ounce of sympathy for them.
Self-awareness is not something that extremists are known for having.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It found that 10 percent of those surveyed said that the “use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.” A third of those who gave that answer also said they owned a gun.
Seven percent of those surveyed said they “support force to restore Trump to the presidency.” Half of them said they owned guns.
The shooting at Mr. Trump’s rally “is a consequence of such significant support for political violence in our country,” Mr. Pape wrote in an email.
“Indeed, significant lone wolf attacks motivated by political violence have been growing for years in the United States, against members of Congress from both parties as well as federal officials and national leaders.”
In October, the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, published a report that found nearly 14 percent of those surveyed strongly agreed that there would be a civil war in the United States in the next few years.
Nearly 8 percent of respondents to the study said they believed there would be a situation in the next few years where political violence would be justified and were intending to arm themselves.
The original article contains 258 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 26%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Worth keeping in mind that polls measuring support for violence come with several caveats. For example a 2021 study assessed how question wording, respondent disengagement and illegitimate answers affected the results, finding that accounting for these factors lowered estimates of support for violence from 18.5% to 2.9%, or at most 6.9%. Even then there are arguments to be made about how social desirability bias and the specific scenarios presented can actually lead to underestimations.
It’s always telling how these headlines talking about “support for political violence” remove any distinction between aggression and self-defense.
Those questions are essentially meaningless. If Trump loses the election, declares himself president anyway and tries to use force to do so, and the US government uses force to stop him, is that not “the use of force to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president?” On the other hand, it could be interpreted to mean, Trump wins the election and you personally go out and shoot him, and the way the question is framed, followed up by whether or not they owned guns and quotes about lone wolf attacks, creates the impression to the reader that that’s what’s meant, but it’s unclear how anybody was interpreting that. Of course, unless you’re a strict pacifist, virtually everyone agrees that violence is sometimes justified, but that tells us nothing about under what circumstances and by whom.
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