This almost takes your breath away. The party that has endorsed violence through the whitewashing of January 6, wants to blame the other party for today's shooting. The party throwing blame has been pushing violence and bloodshed for the last eight years. I am happy to send them "thoughts and prayers." That is all they have when children are mowed down with assault rifles. I remind you our country has a history of political violence and guns are fundamental to that violence.
"Top allies of Donald Trump quickly accused President Biden and his supporters of using rhetoric that led to a shooting and potential assassination attempt Saturday at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pa., even as Biden condemned the attack and called on the nation to unite against political violence." -WP
Remember what the former said about the violence in Charlottesville?
"It stands as a low point in the Trump presidency, a moment difficult to justify for even some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies."
"Amid imagery of violent confrontations, and two days after the death of a young woman protesting against a massive white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan and drew the most infamous equivalency of his time in office."
“I think there is blame on both sides,” the president told reporters that day in August 2017."
“You had some very bad people in that group," Trump said, referring to the white nationalist groups rallying against removal of a Confederate statue. "But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Remember also that the Democrats have been blocked at every turn in getting meaningful gun control through congress. Which party is proud of guns being more important than the lives of children? Not the Democrats.
This article from the Journal of Democracy is good background. Not matter where on the political spectrum today's shooter stood, only one party has been encouraging violence, threats, intimidation and promising bloodshed. That would be the gop. They basically endorsed violence by whitewashing the violence of January 6.
"Recent alterations to violent groups in the United States and to the composition of the two main political parties have created a latent force for violence that can be 1) triggered by a variety of social events that touch on a number of interrelated identities; or 2) purposefully ignited for partisan political purposes. This essay describes the history of such forces in the U.S., shares the risk factors for election violence globally and how they are trending in the U.S., and concludes with some potential paths to mitigate the problem."
"One week after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Eric Coomer, an executive at Dominion Voting Systems, was forced into hiding. Angry supporters of then-president Donald Trump, believing false accusations that Dominion had switched votes in favor of Joe Biden, published Coomer’s home address and phone number and put a million-dollar bounty on his head. Coomer was one of many people in the crosshairs. An unprecedented number of elections administrators received threats in 2020—so much so that a third of poll workers surveyed by the Brennan Center for Justice in April 2021 said that they felt unsafe and 79 percent wanted government-provided security. In July, the Department of Justice set up a special task force specifically to combat threats against election administrators.1
"From death threats against previously anonymous bureaucrats and public-health officials to a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor and the 6 January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, acts of political violence in the United States have skyrocketed in the last five years.2 The nature of political violence has also changed. The media’s focus on groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Boogaloo Bois has obscured a deeper trend: the “ungrouping” of political violence as people self-radicalize via online engagement. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), which maintains the Global Terrorism Database, most political violence in the United States is committed by people who do not belong to any formal organization."
Link to full article