The Role of Violence in American Culture

The shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk is shocking, but unsurprising. It has led to an outpouring of anger, despair, and in some cases, celebration. A great deal of this has had to do with who Kirk was in the MAGA constellation – a powerful speaker, political organiser populist and Christian nationalist. He played a major role in garnering the youth's vote for Donald Trump and was a friend of Vice President J.D. Vance.

Let’s be clear, despite his tragic end, Kirk was no angel. He was a racist who called Martin Luther King a “awful person”, he was a homophobe and Islamophobe and held extreme views on abortion. He also appears to have had some anti-semitic views, accusing Jewish philanthropists of promoting anti-white movements. He was a strong advocate of gun rights and wanted more Americans to have more guns.

Violence has been a defining element of American culture since the nation’s inception, shaping its identity, institutions and social fabric. A feature of US culture are its Judeo-Christian roots that tend to see issues in their Manichean starkness as being either good or evil, leaving little or no room for the in-between.

The US is not alone in the world in seeing violence in its political life, and there is little doubt that its culture of gun ownership clearly worsens its situation. As a corollary to this, the US has been a violent nation, making war routinely, subverting nations across the globe and spending vast sums of money to maintain its military machine.

The shooting itself is not unusual in America, which has a terrible history of domestic political violence where presidents, politicians and judges have been felled by assassins. What is of great concern is that this has happened now. In the US today, there is a tendency by Americans to perceive their opposing party not only in negative terms, but as a threat to the nation. This is a period in which there is a massive and hardening political divide in the country which is headed by a man, Donald Trump, who is a product of it, and also someone who works at widening it.

But if Kirk’s alleged killer seemed to be motivated by anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi ideas linked to the left, the man who nearly killed Trump has no known ideological affiliations or proclivities.

There were two assassination attempts on Trump himself in his election campaign last year, including a near miss shooting, similar to the one that felled Kirk. In July 2025 Melissa Hortman, a former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives was shot and killed at her home along with her husband. In April, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence was set on fire in an assassination attempt while he and his family slept inside.

Brett Kavanaugh, a Justice of the Supreme Court was the target of an attempted assassination in 2022 by a militant women’s right supporter. In the same year, the octogenarian husband of the 52nd Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi was assaulted at home by a right-wing intruder in an attempt which was probably aimed at the former Speaker. In 2020, right wing paramilitary group fomented a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan.

This is only the tip of the American iceberg of violence which has seen school-shootings and other acts of mass violence. According to Everytown Research & Policy which tracks incidents of gunfire in schools, there have been at least 98 incidents of violence on school grounds in 2025 resulting in 31 deaths and 96 injuries.

The US has been unique in terms of having lost chief executives to assassins. Ten of the US’ 45 presidents have been shot at directly, four have been killed and three wounded. As for failed plots, there have been many, almost against all modern day presidents. And, then, there have been the killings of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcom X. And, there has been an assault on the Congress itself which took the form of an assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the 2020 election, an action that resulted in the loss of four lives. Egged on by Trump, mobs shouted “Hang Mike Pence” (the US Vice President) for certifying the election in favour of Joe Biden.

A major contributing factor to the American proneness to violence is the Second Amendment of its Constitution that gives Americans the right to carry guns. This was felt necessary given the circumstances in which the American nation was created through insurrection.

The gun then became the instrument that aided in colonisation and the displacement of American Indians. European settlers justified conquest and territorial expansion with ideologies of manifest destiny, arguing that violence was necessary for progress and civilisation.

Similarly, the institution of Black slavery entrenched systemic violence in American society, guns were used to protect the slave-owner and hunt down runaways. This legacy was shored up by the assassination of Black politicians in the period of Reconstruction and the intense violence visited on free Blacks in the form of lynching; between 1882 and 1930, nearly 3,000 people were lynched in the South, according to the Census Bureau. These legacies continue to reverberate in modern racial inequalities and the ongoing struggle against state and institutional violence.

There was another strand of gun culture where violence also played a crucial role in forging national identity. The Revolutionary War was celebrated as a righteous struggle, solidifying the belief that armed resistance could secure freedom. The Civil War, though devastating, reinforced narratives of sacrifice and unity. Subsequent conflicts – from World War II to the so-called War on Terror – have reinforced the association between American power and the use of arms. This history has created a cultural paradox: while Americans celebrate ideals of liberty and democracy, they have often been imposed elsewhere through violence.

Popular culture further underscores the centrality of violence in the US. Westerns, action films, and video games have long celebrated individualism of the lone gunfighter, brave soldier, or vigilante as an American archetype. Violence is as a means of achieving justice, asserting identity and solving problems.

Speaking after the Kirk assassination, Trump denounced the “radical left” for demonising people like Kirk and said that their rhetoric “is directly responsible for the terrorism that we are seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now." Trump has been tightening his grip on US institutions and expanding presidential powers. He has unleashed ICE on migrants and is now militarising law and order in the US by sending in the National Guard into cities allegedly to fight crime. He has renamed the US Defense Department as the Department of War and used the excuse of “national security” to impose tariffs. Now he could use the Kirk killing to attack what he perceives in the US left – liberals, LGBTQ groups, social activists.

Many commentators have spoken of the Kirk killing as a turning point where the country could go deeper into a spiral of division, mutual recrimination and violence, or pull out of it and heal the divisions that are consuming its polity.

After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the then presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, had emphasised the need to heal the wounds and unite the country. But today, the US has a president who seems to be more consumed by retribution and revenge against enemies, perceived or real, who he claims belong to the “woke” Left and even communist forces.

Manoj Joshi is a distinguished fellow with the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi.

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