Admit it. We are a violent and neurotic society judging by the political assassinations and internecine conflicts spanning red and blue regions of the nation. Like people everywhere, we get outraged at one another and too often raise our quarrels to the point of violence. But unlike people in other countries, we have lots of guns and we find it convenient to use them. It is to our credit, considering all the disputes and available weapons, that more of us have not been killed while defending our beliefs.
Four US presidents have been assassinated. Three have been wounded in attempted assassination. And dozens of other plots and attempts to take the life of a US president were either thwarted or failed in execution. Along the way, Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people (including 19 children) in an Oklahoma City bombing, a political act of defiance against the government. James Earl Ray killed Dr. Martin Luter King in April 1968. Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968. George Wallace was shot and nearly killed in 1972. More recently, several bad actors have killed high profile Democrats and Republicans. Acknowledging our bloody record, Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, asserts politically motivated violence is not quite as alarming as we are led to believe (a post on his webpage on September 11, 2025). He presents data which show the number and share of deaths of all political motivated terrorism and murder since 2020.
Murders in Politically Motivated Terrorism since 2020
All Ideologies Since 2020
Deaths
Share of Deaths
Foreign Nationalism
1
1%
Islamism
17
21%
Left
18
22%
Right
44
54%
Separatism
0
0%
Unknown/Other
1
1%
Total
81
Assigning murder counts to one partisan group or another is not an exact science, of course, but certain agreement must be that all are done in the name of extremism.
Further, in her article “The Rise of Political Violence in the United States,” October 2021, Rachel Kleinfeld uses a graph in the “Journal of Democracy” to show terrorism in the United States by ideology from 2000—2018.
Once again, her figures point to the frequency and variety of political violence.
According to PBS News, “Trump and members of his administration are threatening to target whole organizations and movements and the people who work in them with aggressive legal measures – to jail them or scrutinize their favorable tax status. But research shows that the majority of political violence comes from people following right-wing ideologies.”
Updated on Sep 22, 2025 10:32 AM EDT — Published on Sep 20, 2025 2:48 PM ED
According to recent research done by PBS News, “most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.” *
*Updated on Sep 22, 2025 10:32 AM EDT — Published on Sep 20, 2025 2:48 PM EDT