Thoughts on the Political Shootings in Minnesota

House Speaker Melissa Hortman (D-MN)

This morning, I was stunned to wake up to see my home state of Minnesota trending on social media, and was staggered when I clicked, and found out what had happened.  Last night, former Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and sitting State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot & killed by an assassin, one who had earlier that night shot State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, who are currently still hospitalized but reports show should survive.  Both Hortman and Hoffman are Democratic lawmakers in the closely-divided Minnesota state legislature, where they both provide(d) a key, majority-making or defining vote for the DFL in the legislative body.

This shook me, I won't lie, not just because it was a staggering act of violence, but because this quite literally was close-to-home for me.  Hoffman is my State Senator, and as I'd find out from the news reports this morning, lives about a 5-minute drive from my house (his neighborhood I've driven by pretty much every week for the past seven years).  I live on an incredibly quiet street, as quintessentially suburban as you can imagine (where the biggest crime you normally see is someone having their grass too high).  This is terrifying to know that it was happening so close to my home, and I say this as someone who has lived in relatively high crime areas in my twenties (I literally saw a police chase as I was walking home from buying Oreos when I lived in the Bronx).

When situations like this happen, there's a lot to process, and I will own that I''m still quite frankly in shock (it's not often you have to do the math on a location to understand if you or your friends are currently in a "shelter in place" order or not).  But inevitably with these sorts of situations, there's a lot of misinformation that circulates online until the facts of the situation become presentable (and then oftentimes conspiracy theorists abandon those).  The assassin, at least as of right now, is not in custody, but they do have a suspect whose name they have released to the press, and that it's clear that this was a targeted attack, as a manifesto in the suspect's vehicle contained not just Hortman & Hoffman's names, but also the names of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Senator Tina Smith, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Attorney General Keith Ellison, all of whom are Democrats, and sources at ABC News seem to indicate that this might have some connection with the suspect's extremist views on abortion.

I'm not going to say more here as we don't know what else is true, and I don't want to spread misinformation, but I felt the need to talk about this today because it's on my mind, and so I want to address something that isn't necessarily misinformation, but perhaps is more so focused on lack-of-knowledge.  Earlier this week I complained on social media about the lack of press coverage of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) being forcibly removed from a press conference being held by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.  I didn't talk about it this week here (because honestly my life has felt really messy, and I've been trying to wrap my head around it), but I was struck by how blasé the media was being, buying into the clear, total lie that Noem & her security guard didn't know who the senator was, and that he was a "threat" to her that needed such rough handling.  That the next day Padilla wasn't the top headline of the New York Times or Washington Post made me viscerally angry, another fascist moment from the Trump administration being dismissed as "just another day in the office."

So I want to talk here about, from a purely historical analysis, how rare what happened last night was, and why it should be treated as a big deal.  In a country desensitized to gun violence, it might be safe to assume what happened to Hortman & Hoffman last night is relatively common, and indeed some friends I talked to today assumed it was...but it's not.  Political assassination attempts in the United States are not common.  Recent attempts on the lives of Donald Trump, Paul Pelosi, Steve Scalise, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, & Gabby Giffords made the news because they were so incredibly uncommon.  Even in an America where violent crime is talked about repeatedly in the news (and outpaces all of the western world), it has to be said-this is just not something we typically see. even if you expand your conversation to assassination attempt.

Rep. Leo Ryan (left) meets President John Kennedy (right)
both eventual victims of political assassination

But in terms of successful assassination attempts, like those on Hortman, it's virtually unprecedented in modern time.  The last successful presidential assassination was in 1963 and the last successful assassination attempt on a member of Congress was either Leo Ryan in 1978 or Larry McDonald in 1983 (the strangeness of McDonald's death we discussed in this article if you want to understand why it has an asterisk next to it in terms of being a true assassination).  In fact, in the past 100 years, only one president and only 3-4 (give or take McDonald) sitting members of Congress have been assassinated, and absolutely no governors have.

Even when you go a step further into state legislators, it's very, very rare that a politician is assassinated.  In the past 100 years, despite tens of thousands of Americans having served as legislators, only six have been assassinated, including Hortman, and in the past 50 years, it's just three.  In addition to Hortman, you have Tommy Burks in 1998, who was a State Senator in Tennessee who was murdered by his opponent Byron Looper, who was trying to exploit a loophole in the state law that would allow him to win if his opponent died close to the election & that opponent couldn't be replaced (Looper ended up losing when Burks' widow Charlotte ran as a write-in candidate).  The remaining state legislator would be State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed by a white supremacist in 2015 during the Charleston Church Shooting.

That's it-just those three in the past 40 years.  Burks & Pinckney's deaths were national news.  Charlotte Burks received an across-the-aisle endorsement from Tennessee's Republican Gov. Don Sundquist in her write-in campaign, and President Obama gave the eulogy at Pinckney's funeral.  Given Hortman's position as a former House Speaker, she is arguably the highest-ranking person in American politics to be assassinated since Rep. Ryan in 1978, almost 50 years ago (i.e. older than the majority of most Americans).  Given the conversation about escalating violent rhetoric in this country, particularly if early suggestions were correct that this was a coordinated attack on a specific political party, I think it's important that this not be considered "just another day in modern American politics" given there is virtually no recent political history for what happened last night.