The day after the ultraconservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead while talking at Utah Valley University, commentators repeated a family chorus: “This is not what we are as Americans.”
Others similarly commented on. Whoopi Goldberg, in The View, declared that Americans solve political disagreements peacefully: “This is not the way we do it.”
However, other terrible episodes come immediately to the mind: President John F. Kennedy was shot dead on November 22, 1963. More recently, on June 14, 2025, Melissa Hortman, emeritus president of the Chamber of Representatives of Minnesota, was shot dead at her home, along with her husband and her Golden Retriever.
As a historian of the early stages of the Republic of the United States, I think it is wrong to consider this violence in the country as differentiated “episodes”. Rather, it reflects a recurring pattern.
The American policy customized its violence for a long time. Again and again, it imagined that the progress of history depends on the silencing or destruction of a single figure: the rival that becomes the supreme and despicable enemy.
Therefore, to affirm that such shootings betray “who we are” is to forget that the United States was founded on – and has been held for a long time thanks to – this same form of political violence.
Revolutionary violence as a political theater
The years of the American Revolution were incubated in violence. An abominable practice used against political adversaries was tar and feathers. It was a punishment imported from Europe and popularized by the children of freedom at the end of the 1760s, colonial activists who resisted British domain.
In port cities such as Boston and New York, mobs undressed the political enemies, generally suspected of being loyal – British government parts – or officials who represented the king, spread them with hot tar, wrapped them in feathers and made them parade through the streets.
The effects on the bodies were devastating. When removing tar, the meat was detached in strips. People survived punishment, but retained scars for the rest of their lives.
At the end of the 1770s, the revolution in the so -called central colonies had become a brutal civil war. In New York and New Jersey, patriotic militias, loyalist partisans and British regular troops made incursions through the limits of the counties, attacking farms and neighbors. When the patriotic forces captured the irregular loyalist – often called “Torsa” or “refugees” – they often treated them not as prisoners of war, but as traitors, executing them quickly, usually in the gallows.
In September 1779, six loyalists were captured near Hackensack, New Jersey. They were hanged without trial by the patriotic militia. Similarly, in October 1779, two alleged tories spies captured in the Hudson’s highlands were shot at the act, and their execution was justified as punishment for betrayal.
For patriots, these murders constituted deterrence; For loyal, murder. In any case, they were unequivocally political, eliminating enemies whose “crime” was their loyalty to the wrong side.
Lee also: Trump adopts the role of messenger in chief after the death of Charlie Kirk
Firearms; Duel as a policy and part of the debate
Even after independence, the functioning of American policy continued to based on a logic of violence against adversaries.
For national leaders, gun duel was not just a matter of honor. It normalized a political culture where the shots were considered part of the debate.
The most famous duel, of course, was the murder of Alexander Hamilton at the hands of Aaron Burr in 1804. But dozens of less known clashes splashed the previous decade.
In 1798, Henry Brockholst Livingston – posteriorly judge of the United States Supreme Court – killed James Jones in a duel. Far from being discredited, he was considered an honorable act. In the early days of the Republic, even homicide could be absorbed by politics when it camouflaged in a ritual. Ironically, Livingston had survived an attempt to murder in 1785.
In 1802, another embarrassing show was unleashed: New York Democrats-Republicans Dewitt Clinton and John Swartwout faced each other in Weehawken, New Jersey. They fired at least five shots before their sponsors intervened, resulting in both injured. In this case, the confrontation had nothing to do with political principles; Clinton and Swartwout were Republicans. It was a clientele dispute that, even so, ended up in shootings, demonstrating how normalized armed violence was to solve disputes.
The culture of weapons and its expansion
It is tempting to rule out political violence as a remnant of some “primitive” or “border” stage of American history, when politicians and their supporters allegedly lacked moderation or higher moral standards. But that is not the case.
From before the revolution, physical punishment or even murder were ways to impose belonging, to mark the border between those inside and those of outside and decide who had the right to govern.
Violence has never been a distortion in American politics. It was one of its recurring characteristics; Not an aberration, but a persistent, destructive force and, nevertheless, curiously creative, that generates new borders and new regimes.
The dynamics deepened as possession of weapons expanded. In the nineteenth century, industrial weapons production and aggressive federal contracts promoted the circulation of more weapons. The rituals to punish those who had a wrong loyalty found expression in the mass production revolver and, subsequently, in the automatic rifle.
These more modern firearms became not only practical tools of war, crime or personal defense, but also in symbolic objects. They embodied authority, transmitted cultural significance and gave their possessors the feeling that legitimacy could be claimed to the gun cannon.
Therefore, the phrase “this is not what we are” sounds false. Political violence has always been part of the history of the United States, not as a passing anomaly or an isolated episode.
To deny it is to leave the Americans helpless before her. Just facing this story from the front can begin to imagine a policy that is not defined by weapons.
*Maurizio Valsania He is Professor of History of the United States, University of Turin
This article was originally published in The Conversation
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