The recent attempted assassination of Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, which resulted in the death of one rally attendee and injuries to the candidate and two others, was not an isolated event. The high profile incident occurred against a backdrop of lower-level attacks and violent protests across the country that indicate too many Americans are increasingly willing to exchange battles over ideas for fists, bullets, and firebombs. It's a sign of an existential political climate in which nobody thinks they can afford to lose—or that opponents can be allowed to win.

Not-So-Isolated Incidents

"A Michigan man used an all-terrain vehicle to run over and critically injure an 80-year-old man who was putting a Trump sign in his yard, in what police have described as a politically motivated attack," the BBC reported July 23. The apparent attacker killed himself after calling police to confess to the crime.

Just days later, anti-Israel protesters vandalized property and battled police in Washington, D.C. in what has become almost a matter of routine.

The partisan Michigan attacker, the mysteriously motivated would-be assassin, and the subset of protesters who cross the line don't really represent mass endorsements of violence. They're often lone actors or extremists within their own movements. But no majority vote is required before people and property are attacked. It just takes somebody willing to get physical, and too many meet that bar.

Politics Plagued by a Violent Minority

Last month, the University of Chicago's Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science who studies political violence, released the results of a study on Americans' attitudes towards using violent means to achieve political ends. What he found is that 10 percent of respondents agree "the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president." Opposing them are 6.9 percent of respondents who agree "the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency."

When questions about justifying violence are given broader scope, researchers find larger numbers open to its use. Last year a study from the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis found "one-third of respondents…considered violence to be usually or always justified to advance at least 1 of 17 specific political objectives," including preventing discrimination based on race or ethnicity and preserving an American way of life based on Western European traditions.

The good news is that even the larger numbers still represent a minority of the population, outnumbered by those who prefer to keep bullets and bombs out of their political discourse. The bad news is it only takes one person to target a candidate or run over a homeowner putting a sign on his lawn. And it only takes one, or a handful, to stage any of the myriad lower-profile incidents that suggest we're in a cycle of political strife.

Rising Tide of Threats and Attacks

In March, a California man pled guilty to firebombing a Costa Mesa Planned Parenthood clinic—the third suspect to do so in that crime. They had planned other attacks that were thwarted by their arrests.

In January, the Center of the American Experiment, the Upper Midwest Law Center, and TakeCharge—three Minnesota conservative groups—were targeted by arsonists in what was believed to be an act of political terrorism. The organizations are offering a $100,000 reward "for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual or individuals who started the arson fires."

A car belonging to a Portland, Oregon, city commissioner's family was torched outside his home just weeks before that. In response, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt warned "acts of political violence and acts of political vandalism are unacceptable and will not be tolerated."

Gonzalez is far from alone in being violently targeted by people who disagree with him.

"The number of threats to public officials is growing," according to a May data review from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "While 2013-2016 had an average of 38 federal charges per year, that number sharply increased to an average of 62 charges per year between 2017-2022."

The review added that ideological motivations could be confirmed for roughly half the cases, and that "the number of federal prosecutions is on pace to hit new record highs" this year.

High Stakes Politics and Rising Illiberalism

Much of this is the result of the rising tensions of recent years. Political factions have gone from opposing each other to despising each other and considering opponents too vile and dangerous to be allowed to win office and exercise power. That political leaders tear not just into each other, but into whole segments of the population they perceive as alien understandably reinforces fears of the criminal justice system and the regulatory state in the hands of enemies.

Added to that is the abandonment of liberal ideas about restrained government and tolerance by both the left and the right. In their place are thuggish ideologies that leave little room for dissent.

"On the left, a new crop of socialists hope to overthrow the liberal economic order, while the rise of intersectional identity politics has supplanted longstanding commitments to civil liberties," Reason's Stephanie Slade wrote in 2022. "On the right, support for free markets and free trade are more and more often derided as relics of a bygone century, while quasi-theocratic ideas are gathering support."

That creates an environment in which violence might become just another tactic for people who consider their causes of overriding importance. In January, The New York Times interviewed Andreas Malm, a celebrity activist who advocates for political violence on behalf of climate causes. He clarifies that he supports targeting property, not people, but "can't guarantee that it won't come with accidents."

He also thinks his opponents shouldn't be allowed to use the same tactics in return, saying "the idea that if you object to your enemy's use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions."

Malm, it should be noted, is Swedish. And that points to the fact that America isn't alone in seeing activists adopt violence as a preferred means of achieving results.

"American political violence has much in common with that taking place in Germany and India, as well as in France's most recent election," Rachel Kleinfeld recently noted in Foreign Affairs.

Shared misery is cold comfort, but it may be the only kind available right now.

The post The Wave of Political Violence Has No End in Sight appeared first on Reason.com.

Dennis Powanda and Vincent Yakaitis are bound together by a common experience: They were both criminally charged in connection with an attempted burglary. Powanda was the burglar, and Yakaitis was the property owner.

Ah, justice.

Indeed, that's not a misprint, parody, or a bad joke (although I wish it were the latter). Powanda was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and burglary, along with other related offenses, for executing the botched raid a little before 2:00 a.m. in February 2023 at Yakaitis' property in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania. The government charged Yakaitis, who is in his mid-70s, with using a firearm without a license after he shot Powanda, despite that it appears prosecutors agree Yakaitis justifiably used that same firearm in self-defense.

Whatever your vantage point—whether you care about criminal justice reform and a fair legal system, or gun rights, or all of the above—it is difficult to make sense of arresting and potentially imprisoning someone over what essentially amounts to a paperwork violation. That injustice is even more glaring when considering that Powanda, 40, allegedly charged at Yakaitis, who happens to be about three and a half decades older than Powanda.

Pennsylvania's permitting regime does carve out a couple of exceptions, one of which would seem to highly favor Yakaitis. Someone does not need a license to carry, according to the law, "in his place of abode or fixed place of business." Yakaitis owned the home Powanda attempted to burglarize. The catch: He didn't live there—it reportedly had no tenants at the time of the crime—opening a window for law enforcement to charge him essentially on a technicality.

If convicted, Yakaitis faces up to five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Quite the price to pay for protecting your life on your own property. The misdemeanor charge also implies that Yakaitis has no history of using his weapon inappropriately, or any criminal record at all, as Pennsylvania law classifies his particular crime—carrying a firearm without a license—as a felony if the defendant has prior criminal convictions and would be disqualified from obtaining such a license. In other words, we can deduce that Yakaitis was a law-abiding citizen and eligible for a permit, which means he is staring down five years in a cell for not turning in a form and paying a fee to local law enforcement. OK.

Yakaitis is not the first such case. In June, law enforcement in New York charged Charles Foehner with so many gun possession crimes that if convicted on all of them he would face life in prison. Police came to be aware of his unlicensed firearms when Foehner defended himself against an attempted mugger—the surveillance footage is here—after which they searched Foehner's home and found that only some of his weapons were licensed with the state.

Prosecutors classified it as a justified shooting. And then they hit Foehner with an avalanche of criminal charges that would have resulted in a longer prison sentence than his assailant would have received, had he survived.

There's also LaShawn Craig, another New York City man whose case I covered in December. He, too, shot someone in self-defense and he, too, was arrested for doing so without a license. Like Foehner, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, a violent felony in New York. For a paperwork violation.

New York is a particularly relevant case study on the subject, as its highly restrictive concealed carry framework was the subject of a landmark Supreme Court case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen—which the majority disemboweled. It wasn't just conservative gun rights advocates who wanted that ruling, although you'd be forgiven for thinking so based on how polarized this debate tends to be. That Supreme Court decision also attracted support from progressive public defenders with The Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, The Bronx Defenders, and Brooklyn Defender Services. As I wrote in June about the amicus brief they submitted to the Court:

[The public defenders] offered several case studies centered around people whose lives were similarly upended. Among them were Benjamin Prosser and Sam Little, who had both been victims of violent crimes and who are now considered "violent felons" in the eyes of the state simply for carrying a firearm without the mandated government approval. Little, a single father who had previously been slashed in the face, was separated from his family while he served his sentence at the Vernon C. Bain Center, a notorious jail that floats on the East River. The conviction destroyed his nascent career, with the Department of Education rescinding its offer of employment.

In many jurisdictions, including New York, it can be expensive and time-consuming to get the required license, which in turn makes the Second Amendment available only to people of a certain class.

So where do we go from here? Those skeptical of rolling back concealed carry restrictions may take comfort in the fact that this doesn't have to be black and white. Governments, for example, can "give eligible persons a 30-day grace period to seek and obtain a permit after being charged, then automatically drop charges and expunge record once obtained," offers Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, or "remove the criminal penalty entirely" and perhaps "make it a fineable infraction," like driving without a license.

Whatever the case, it should be—it is—possible to balance public safety with the right to bear arms, and, as an extension, the right to self-defense. To argue otherwise is to embolden a legal system that incentivizes elderly men like Yakaitis to sit down and take it when someone threatens their life.

The post This Elderly Man Was Arrested After Shooting a Burglar in Self-Defense—for Carrying the Gun Without a License appeared first on Reason.com.