For a long time -- maybe since Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate Gerald Ford -- it seemed like the extreme American Right held a monopoly on lethal political violence. More recently things have changed. In my mind -- this could be a function of my own blindness -- it really got ramped up when a left wing guy with a rifle tried to take out a bunch of Republican members of Congress at an annual baseball game in January 2017, injuring Steve Scalise of Louisiana. We were all fortunate no one else was hurt and that Scalise was not hurt worse than he was.
Today there's a headline about an attack with a freaking flamethrower on some people in Boulder exercising their First Amendment rights. This follows hard on the assassination of a couple of young Israeli Embassy staffers in DC. And the killing in broad daylight of the United Healthcare CEO last December. And the attempt to assassinate Trump on the Florida golf course (the kid in Pennsylvania does not seem to have been on the left). There's been more.
All of these should be condemned unequivocally and forcefully. That is not who we are. If liberals are going to decry violence on the Right we need to be consistent. More fundamentally, people aren't supposed to kill each other. Full stop.
postscrypt: I just went back and saw that the attacker is an Egyptian. That doesn't really change anything that I said. Everybody on all sides needs to dial it back.
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