The assassination of Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, has raised alarms about the scourge of political violence in the United States, escalating anxieties about the safety of public figures on both sides of the ideological spectrum.
Kirk’s killing was the latest in a series of attacks and threats targeting a range of American political figures, from President Donald Trump and members of Congress to governors and judges. Kirk was not an elected official, though he wielded influence as the founder of conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA and was a close ally of the Trump administration.
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“I was not, in any way, surprised” by Kirk’s killing, said Michael Jensen, a researcher at the University of Maryland who tracks such violence in a domestic terrorism database. Jensen said he has seen an increase in attacks targeting what he characterizes as “government entities” — legislators and candidates, as well as officers carrying out immigration enforcement actions.
“You cannot simply say it’s coming from the left, it’s coming from the right [or] it’s coming from the fringe. It’s coming from everywhere,” Jensen said.
American politics has long been haunted by political violence. In the 1960s, for example, one of the most socially turbulent decades in modern U.S. history, assassins gunned down President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and the civil rights leader Medgar Evers. In the decades that followed, President Gerald Ford and President Ronald Reagan survived attempts on their lives that were captured by television cameras.
But modern American life includes an accelerant that didn’t exist in those earlier eras: social media and the average person’s ability to easily broadcast extreme views to large audiences worldwide. It’s a technological shift that has led to more intense polarization, stripping public discourse of context and nuance. As a result, many politicians have adopted these methods, too.
NBC News polling data from 2010 shows that 50% of Republicans at the time viewed the Democratic Party “very” negatively, while 40% of Democrats viewed the Republican Party “very” negatively. The March 2025 NBC News poll showed how both figures had risen in the last 15 years, with 69% of Democrats viewing the GOP very negatively and 70% of Republicans saying they had very negative views of the Democratic Party.
Jensen, the University of Maryland researcher, said the contemporary political environment, defined in part by “hyperpartisanship” and misinformation, leads to conditions that are “potentially prime for violence.”
“What’s important to understand is that all of this is happening in an information environment where the loudest and most vitriolic voices garner the largest audiences,” Jensen said.
In the last five years alone, the country has seen a steady drumbeat of violence.
Kirk’s shooting at Utah Valley University came nearly three months after a gunman killed former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and injured State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. Two months earlier, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence was set on fire by a man who suggested he was upset by the governor’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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In the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump narrowly survived a shooting during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Two months later, he was saved by Secret Service agents who fired on a gunman lying in wait for Trump on his golf course in Florida.
In the fall of 2022, a man broke into former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in an effort to kidnap her and then assaulted her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. The previous year, on Jan. 6, a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and pipe bombs were found at both Democratic and Republican Party headquarters.
In the past few years, law enforcement officials have also prevented attempts to harm political figures. Authorities arrested and charged a California man in the attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. Two years earlier, FBI agents foiled a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Meanwhile, Democratic and Republican officials alike have described facing growing harassment and threats. More than a half-dozen potential contenders in the 2028 presidential contest have either personally experienced political violence or found themselves managing the response to such acts, including Shapiro, Whitmer, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Last year, more than 9,400 direct threats and concerning statements were made against members of Congress, their families and staff, and the Capitol complex, according to the U.S. Capitol Police. That is more than double the number in 2017, according to the data. By the end of this calendar year, the U.S. Capitol Police said it is on track to work through 14,000 threat assessment cases involving lawmakers.
Serious threats against federal judges doubled between fiscal 2021 and 2023, climbing to 457 from 2024, according to data from the U.S. Marshals Service.
Kirk’s assassin remained at large Thursday. The shooter’s identity and motivation were unknown. Kirk addressed a crowd of hundreds at Utah Valley University in an open-air campus amphitheater.
In an interview, a former senior Justice Department official said it was too early to know whether Kirk’s killing could lead to a greater spiral of political violence.
“I’m worried about violence but I don’t have information,” the former DOJ official said. “Tell me who did it. Tell me their motive.”
Glenn Gerstell, the former general counsel of the National Security Agency, who has written extensively about online disinformation, said society should also be concerned with how to recover from political violence.
“We’ve got lots of times in our history where we’ve had terrible, terrible divisions, one led to the Civil War,” he said. “I think there is a lot of resilience in the American character. Most people don’t like name-calling. I think that’s not us.”
But Gerstell said he fears that the disinformation and conspiracy theories that abound on social media platforms will make it more difficult for Americans to unify now than in previous eras.
“I think we’ll only partially be able to go back because of the advent of social media, which exacerbates hatred and division,” Gerstell said. “It stokes division. Not only does it foment it, it sustains it.”