A recent Colorado Politics story is especially disquieting. Only in the United States do you see a story dedicated to analyzing the large number of mass killings over the last 50 years or so. The story notes in the last 10-year period, the number of mass killings linked to extremism has tripled. Let’s say that again: the number of mass killings linked to extreme political views has tripled.  

And to be even more clear, this upward trend has come from the far-right. In fact, in 2022, all the extremist killings were linked to right-wing extremists, including our own Club Q shooting, where the cowardly killer ran a neo-Nazi website, containing a number of hate posts and rants about the LGBTQI+ community. Heck, he was posting videos right before he started shooting, and it appears, based on his affixing a phone camera to a hat, that he had intended to live stream his hate and murder.

Back in the 1970s, you’d see perhaps two to seven such killings per decade. In the 2010s we saw 21. Also increasing is the number of victims. Between 2010 and 2020, 164 people died from ideological mass killings, more than any decade other than the 1990s, when the Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 in one event, also linked to right-wing extremists. But the trend is terrible, with 25 extremism-related killings last year, happily a slight decrease from the 33 the year before.

Surely even the most devoted supporter of the Second Amendment must pause and reflect on the carnage we have been seeing. And just as there is no single cause to such violence, there will be no single and simple solution.

Many of these horrible attacks have been carried out by folks who are identified as white supremacists. There is a certain irony in this term, as I have yet to see any of these terrible people whom appear to be actually superior to any other human. Rather, these folks are the dregs of a society they desperately want to join but who lack the skills to successfully pursue the American dream. Pathetic and small, these men (it’s almost always men) seek to inflict suffering on a society they blame for their own failures in life, often including the inability to get a date.

And I don’t throw most of the blame at the feet of Donald Trump. Though it is absolutely true that he has exploited and embraced the far-right’s phantom persecution beliefs, Trump did not create them. He did, however, boost them and create at least some sense of legitimacy by incorporating groups like the Proud Boys in his support base. He has given permission for those who feel oppressed because white people are having it so hard these days (spoiler: we aren’t – giving other people well-deserved rights is not an attack on white folks) to bring their vile and despicable views into the daylight. There was a time when, say, a white supremacist knew he shouldn’t walk the streets waving a confederate battle flag. Yet two years ago, that flag was proudly carried inside the United States Capitol during an attempted insurrection.

When more and more extreme views are seen as mainstream, more radical ideas and actions begin to seem, to some, as reasonable acts of political violence. Even today, the GOP is so fully captured by their extremist far-right that they can’t even condemn Trump for supporting the coup attempt and for trying to overthrow a legitimate election. Heck, they won’t even toss out a new congressman from New York who has told so many lies even he can’t keep them straight. But refuse to seat a guy who appears to have stolen money from a veteran over a dog? Nope. There is apparently no ultimate bottom level below which this GOP will sink. And as they descend lower, they empower those who think shooting up a gay night club is a good idea.

Of course, I don’t have the single solution that will fix this extremist problem. There have certainly been leftist extremists who employed violence, but far less in recent years than those on the far-right. As a proud gun owner myself, and a former military cop who carried an M-16, I support reasonable gun laws, as I’ve written about 13 times before. The trick, of course, is where you draw the “reasonable” line. But I’d hope that most Americans could agree (and it turns out they do) that military-grade weapons should not be part of a gun owner’s armory.

We also need additional responsible and grown-up talk from our leaders. This responsibility will mostly fall on the GOP, as the Dem party’s leadership is pretty much all on record for some additional restrictions on weapons designed to kill on the battlefield. But until Kevin McCarthy and his ilk are willing to risk their own reelection for what is good and honorable – the declaring that Trump isn’t the GOP leader anymore would be a start – we will see little progress.

I wish I could be optimistic, but I am not. Heck, just this week an Alabama GOP congressman, Barry Moore, unveiled his legislation to declare the AR-15 to be the “National Gun of America.” Seriously.

I can’t help but wonder what history, perhaps 500 years from now, will record about our problems with extremist shootings and gun violence. The record will either show that we came to our senses or we did not. The latter course will no doubt document more blood spilled. And that’s a terrible shame.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.