Is this what happens when you dedicate your lives to stopping gun regulation, while simultaneously making literal calls for political violence? Feels like every republican shocked by gun violence against them is in serious leopards-ate-my-face-mode. I don’t have an ounce of sympathy for them.
Self-awareness is not something that extremists are known for having.
Worth keeping in mind that polls measuring support for violence come with several caveats. For example a 2021 study assessed how question wording, respondent disengagement and illegitimate answers affected the results, finding that accounting for these factors lowered estimates of support for violence from 18.5% to 2.9%, or at most 6.9%. Even then there are arguments to be made about how social desirability bias and the specific scenarios presented can actually lead to underestimations.
It’s always telling how these headlines talking about “support for political violence” remove any distinction between aggression and self-defense.
Those questions are essentially meaningless. If Trump loses the election, declares himself president anyway and tries to use force to do so, and the US government uses force to stop him, is that not “the use of force to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president?” On the other hand, it could be interpreted to mean, Trump wins the election and you personally go out and shoot him, and the way the question is framed, followed up by whether or not they owned guns and quotes about lone wolf attacks, creates the impression to the reader that that’s what’s meant, but it’s unclear how anybody was interpreting that. Of course, unless you’re a strict pacifist, virtually everyone agrees that violence is sometimes justified, but that tells us nothing about under what circumstances and by whom.
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