The assassination attempt on former President Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday felt familiar in a uniquely American way.
The shooter aimed his AR-style rifle at people gathered far from his rooftop perch, echoing the 2017 mass shooting in which a gunman opened fire on a music festival from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel.
Law enforcement said the shooter was 20 years old and obtained the gun he used at home, like so many other young gunmen who have left bloody trails at schools, churches, bars and other community gathering places across this country.
“Our communities are regularly rocked by acts of gun violence that invade what should be our safe haven,” said Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of the gun control advocacy organization Moms Demand Action. “But these acts are the result of our nation’s weak gun laws and gun culture everywhere — laws that allow hate to be armed with a weapon to easily take someone’s life.”
As leaders and average Americans on both sides decry political violence, the divide over guns appeared raw again Sunday, but little has changed. Despite their presidential candidate nearly being shot, none of the leading Republicans called on the party to soften its ardent support for the right to bear arms.
Yet the shooting is yet another particularly striking example of another American institution — this time the electoral process — falling victim to the massive proliferation of modern firearms. And that could matter as courts across the country and in California continue to determine when, where and why these weapons can be restricted, if at all.
Right now, federal courts are considering challenges to a California law banning exactly the type of AR-style rifle used by the alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania; another barring people Crooks’ age and younger from owning firearms; and a third barring people from carrying firearms in a range of “sensitive” locations — including public gatherings and special events.
A person is evacuated from the stands by state police after a gun was pulled on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.
(Rebecca Droke/AFP via Getty Images)
Like the Las Vegas shootings, where a gunman killed nearly 60 people and wounded hundreds more, Saturday’s attack has raised questions about how to define such sensitive locations and how to determine whether a certain type of firearm or accessory is so dangerous that it doesn’t benefit from Second Amendment protections, legal experts said.
These questions have taken on even greater weight following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen, in which the high court declared that most gun laws are legitimate only if they are rooted in the nation’s history and tradition or are sufficiently analogous to a historical law.
In October, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego, citing the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, ruled that California’s ban on the type of AR-style weapon used Saturday was unconstitutional because it was not rooted in history — and because assault rifles are common enough and not particularly dangerous.
“Like the Bowie knife that was commonly carried by citizens and soldiers in the 1800s,” Benitez wrote at the beginning of his decision, “‘assault weapons’ are dangerous, but useful.”
Of course, assault rifles are far more dangerous than Bowie knives, and their range of damage is vastly different. Federal authorities, for example, said Crooks shot Trump from an “elevated position outside the rally venue”—which, according to the Washington Post, was about 130 yards from where Trump was speaking.
Darrell A.H. Miller, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who studies Second Amendment law, said there is a “pretty well-established” legal tradition that political rallies and other campaign events are sensitive venues where guns can be banned.
However, Saturday’s shooting has raised new questions about the scope of such and similar restrictions – and about the nature of “sensitive locations” and how their boundaries can and should be defined, they and other experts said.
“The sensitive locations doctrine, as it is currently being developed, may need to be sensitive to changes in firearms technology over the last 200 years,” Miller said in an interview Sunday.
Legal experts said the shooting could also help gun control advocates argue that these powerful, long-range weapons are particularly dangerous even if they are commonly owned, and that their ban in California and elsewhere is therefore consistent with other longstanding bans on particularly dangerous weapons such as machine guns.
Steve Gordon, a former LAPD special weapons officer and sniper, said the shot that hit Trump was not particularly difficult with some training, despite the distance.
“This type of rifle is standard equipment for police and military use and it’s not a difficult shot to make with this weapon system,” Gordon told the Times.
Congressional Republicans and the Biden administration have said Saturday’s shooting will be thoroughly investigated, including whether anything could have been done differently to prevent it. It’s not yet clear what those investigations might yield.
Trump’s shooting could also be cited as another piece of evidence — a historically monumental one — in favor of laws, like California’s, that prohibit the sale of such guns to people under 21, whether Crooks personally purchased the weapon or not.
Gun control advocates could use the additional evidence of the unique threat posed by powerful, long-range weapons in the hands of unstable young men, especially given the uphill battle they face defending gun restrictions after Bruen.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that domestic violence offenders can be barred from owning guns, but it has ruled against gun regulation in other cases. Last month, the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on bump stocks, an accessory that allows shooters to fire much more quickly and was used in the Las Vegas shooting.
Beyond the courts, Trump’s shooting has already made a major entrance into the national debate over guns.
For example, when the National Rifle Association offered prayers to Trump, law enforcement and others at the rally in a post on the social media platform X, Shannon Watts — co-founder of Moms Demand Action and the affiliate group Everytown — responded with a bristling retort suggesting hypocrisy on the NRA’s part.
“The NRA’s extremist agenda gave a 20-year-old would-be assassin access to a weapon of war, rendering even the most highly trained security forces incapable of protecting anyone — from schoolchildren to former presidents,” Watts wrote.
She went on to note that such weapons have been used in recent years to murder people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and schools across the country, from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Uvalde, Texas, to Parkland, Florida.
Others have made similar connections.
“If you keep talking about the assassination attempt, don’t you dare tell the children who survive school shootings and their families to ‘just get over it,’” wrote David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting that killed 17 people and injured others at his Parkland high school in 2018.
Hogg was apparently referring to comments Trump made about the need to “get over” an Iowa school shooting earlier this year, which were roundly condemned by gun control advocates and survivors.
What happened Saturday was “unacceptable,” Hogg wrote, but so is “what happens every day to children who are not the president and who do not survive.”
Times Permanent editor Richard Winton contributed to this report.
