In the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump last weekend at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, The Durango Herald asked La Plata County residents: “What was the biggest factor that contributed to Trump’s assassination attempt, and how should the country move forward?”
Residents questioned the availability of guns, security lapses and the state of mental health among America’s young people. But by and large, residents said the political rhetoric needs to be toned down in this country.
Here are their answers:
“The largest contributing factor was the overheated political rhetoric combined with the fact that this young man, a loner, probably bullied in school was so easily able to get such a lethal weapon, and also by chance and mistakes of security to gets so close to assassinating former President Trump. The best way to move forward is to listen to what both parties have said, at least some of them, that we need very much to tone down the political rhetoric and to concentrate on what makes the United States a democracy, which does not involve violence in any form, especially political violence.”
“The despair and desperation young people feel. Yes, they have access to guns, but they’re also like, ‘How can I solve problems? All the problems seem unresolvable,’ whether it be climate change, politics or divisiveness. I don’t feel like politics right now includes the opinions or the work of young people. I just read something about a ‘gerontocracy’ and what happens when you just have old, white men gaining power. So, I still would like to see Biden step down, have a younger person and have them win the election and try to pull in young people.”
“The largest would be easy access to guns. The best way to move forward is to step away from conspiracy theories, such as there’s a deep state in charge of things or the liberal media is going to deliberately distort things. It’s red meat to Trump’s followers, the MAGA followers. I’m not talking about conservatives. Conservatives are fine. It’s the MAGA people who are the fanatics.”
“I honestly think it was the rhetoric that the Republicans, as we know them today, have been spreading for the past nine years. You see a lot of murmurings out of the more conservative side that this is all because of the rhetoric that Democrats have pushed with regards to Project 2025, all the news of that spreading, which should be spread. So I do feel like most of it was the rhetoric from the right, their constant vilification of people they have no business vilifying. Now I feel like we need the current president to take his newfound powers that have been given to him by the Supreme Court of the United States with regard to official presidential acts, and we need some justice brought, at the very least I feel like Trump should be put in custody.”
“I can’t answer that because it feels like making a generalization about a specific event. I personally don’t think any of us know enough, we don’t really know what the dude’s deal was. Also, I don’t think that political violence is an inevitability. Both sides have harmful rhetoric, but I don’t really think that leads to an assassination attempt by one dude on a roof. I think the way that we move forward is continuing to take things on a case-by-case basis and not making generalizations. My first response was ‘Oh, damn it, now he’s going to be a martyr, right?’ The same thing would have happened if someone tried to assassinate Biden. We just need to take things in context.”
“I think it’s how controversial he (Trump) is, a lot of people don’t like him as a president. I think that leads to a lot of anger. Trump’s actions have been deemed not OK by the left. And then the left has this rhetoric they’re pushing that he’s going to end democracy and he’s going to just keep pushing himself into more and more power. I think that is a genuine fear. Then I think it led to this, people thinking it’s OK to try to assassinate the president and I think it’s a gross exaggeration of what needed to happen.”
“Who knows individually what this person was thinking? There’s so much misinformation you really don’t know. But I think maybe people are feeling desperate. Because at this point no one really likes Trump or Biden and we don’t really know what else to do. Maybe it wasn’t anything personal against Donald Trump, but they just wanted to see something change. For me, it just feels like something that happens like any other trend, and then we’ll move on from it in like a week.”
“I think the former president is a really polarizing figure. With the polarization, there’s a tendency for people to only see their side of things. In this case, gun control, a lot of people are really upset about this assassination attempt. I was reading in The New York Times this morning that they had a “peaceful right to congregate” so this shouldn’t have happened and my immediate thought was, ‘Yeah, and all the kids in the schools have a peaceful right to education.’ People need to take a moment and think about how issues affect others and not just themselves.”
“We don’t have any precision about what happened. Apparently, the gunman was a member of the Republican Party, and it doesn’t make any sense for a Republican to kill another Republican. One thing that I would add is that it was a question of millimeters, two millimeters later Trump was dead. As a country, we have an internal gun control situation where there are 340 million people and 440 million guns in circulation. I do not know how to resolve this.”
An earlier version of this story erred in saying the shooting occurred in Bethel, Pennsylvania. Bethel is where the suspected shooter is from; the shooting itself occurred in Butler, Pennsylvania.
