Why a leading expert on gun violence is sounding alarms about the 2024 election

It’s been less than two months since the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and while lawmakers and law enforcement are continuing to investigate what happened, the presidential campaign has largely moved on. Investigators say that the shooter was likely less motivated by political ideology than he was by a desire to commit a mass shooting. But for researchers who study political violence, there are still concerns about the risk that the US will experience more dangerous incidents this election cycle and beyond. The assassination attempt is the latest event — after the intimidation of election officials and workers by Trump supporters in 2020 and the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, not to mention rhetoric from the Republican candidate and his allies — to heighten their worries. In July, a group of legal scholars, national security experts, and law enforcement called on elected officials to create election safety task forces on a state and national level to respond to and monitor threats pertaining to the election. (The Department of Justice launched an election threat task force in 2021, but election workers and officials still say they are worried for their safety.) Gun violence researchers are also concerned. Garen Wintemute, a physician and founder of UC Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program, has been studying gun violence since the 1980s. In late 2021, the center turned its attention to political violence. Last year, it published the results of a large survey digging into Americans’ beliefs on the issue. “Small but concerning proportions of the population consider violence, including lethal violence, to be usually or always justified to advance political objectives,” Wintemute and his colleagues write. Nearly 19 percent of respondents said that “having a strong leader” was more important than having a democracy. Almost 14 percent predicted a civil war in the United States in the next few years, and just under eight percent said that in the next few years, if they found themselves in a situation where they believed political violence was justified, they planned to be armed with a gun. The center is preparing to release a new survey this fall, with its latest insights on the appetite for political violence in the United States. Before they do, Wintemute shared with Vox some early takeaways from its findings, along with some ideas about what people can do to create a country less vulnerable to political violence. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What does the 2024 data reveal about the risk for political violence in the US? Garen Wintemute: We’re continuing to see a sustained level of support for the idea of political violence, and of willingness to be a combatant if civil war comes about. There is a clear connection with some subsets of firearm ownership, but also with racism and sexism and homophobia — pretty much any brand of fear and loathing you might want to mention. What we’re seeing bears out hunches and predictions people had years ago, but there are two pieces of good news: One is that gun purchasing did eventually fall back to essentially baseline levels [from 2020 and 2021.] It’s a leading indicator and we watch it like a hawk. The other piece of good news is that rates of gun violence were frighteningly high in 2020 and 2021, but fell in 2022 and 2023. So far, we’re not seeing an increase from 2023 in 2024. But I’ll put an asterisk on that. We’re living through this in real time. I think there’s probably agreement among the people who look at this closely that the set of circumstances most likely to produce political violence in this country in the next few months are a closely contested election, with momentum swinging to Democrats, and with high-profile instances of political violence having already occurred. Those are the circumstances we are in today. The barometer fluctuates a little, but right after the assassination attempt I got asked, did you think this was going to happen, what happened to Donald Trump in Pennsylvania? You can’t predict the specifics, but for weeks, I’d been ending every day, thinking: Wow, we made it another day. Yes, it’s going to happen. With that same level of certainty, I think it will happen again. Whether it will involve an elected official as a target, I can’t say. But we’ve opened the door to political violence this election season, and there are still some leaders using rhetoric that enables violence. And we will all pay a price for that, I suspect. You don’t think this is the last we’ve seen of political violence this election cycle? I personally think that large-scale political violence is really, really unlikely. I feel more sanguine about that prediction, given our 2024 data. We asked people, suppose that there were a right-wing insurgency or a left-wing insurgency. Would you support either over the government? In both cases, most respondents said neither. I take that as good news. Large-scale violence is really unlikely. A few months from now, I might feel differently. But sporadic outbreaks, particularly if the battleground states remain really close — is it possible? Sure. Might there be attempts to intimidate election officials? Absolutely. Most of us, most of the time, and some of us, all of the time, do not think that violence is how we solve problems in this country. We will react negatively when people use violence. What we really need to work on is producing a culture that is not receptive to the propagation of political violence, so it might happen here and there but we won’t see a sustained chain of events. Where is political violence most likely to come from? Probably the most influential social movement in the US right now is Christian nationalism, which holds not just that the United States, by tradition, is and ought to be a Christian nation, but that end times are coming and we need to be ready. I think of this partly as a researcher, and partly as a clinician. Psychological injury is like physical injury; it can heal, but it leaves a scar. It leaves the person changed. So people who have sustained psychological injury after injury, or they’ve seen their privileged status in this society erode, need to make sense of it all. So how do some make sense of it all? They find somebody to blame, which is where you get xenophobia and replacement theory, and so on. You find a way to make it right. You start to think, I’m willing to kill and be killed in order to preserve the thing I believe in. That is how wars start. What works at preventing political violence? Do we know? We do have some data on this. We asked people: If a civil war broke out, how likely would you be to do any of the following things? They started with leaving the country and ended with killing a noncombatant from the other side, with a bunch of options in between. In the middle was participate as a combatant. It was a small number of people who said yes. We asked the people who said it was not at all likely that they’d participate as a combatant, would you change your position from if you were urged to do so by family, friends, religious leaders, community leaders, or the media? And conversely, we asked the people who said they would be combatant, would you change your position in response to those same groups? The people who started with saying “I’m not going to be a combatant” were not open to change. It didn’t matter the source of influence. For the would-be combatants, a big number would switch if their family asked them not to, or friends, or even some media sources. I was literally dancing around this office, seeing the numbers on the screen, because that leads directly to intervention. Basically, the vast majority of people out there who do not think violence is justified need to talk it up, because you’re not going to change your mind and we can prove it. But the people on the other side, if you talk to them — whether we’re talking about individuals talking to family and friends, or media outlets putting it in their programming — we can create a climate of nonacceptance for political violence. And in doing that, we can expect that it will work.

We need your support today

Why a leading expert on gun violence is sounding alarms about the 2024 election