Political violence jolts the US once again - with a familiar response

Political violence jolts the US once again - with a familiar response6 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleAnthony ZurcherNorth America correspondentTrump: How shooting at White House correspondents' dinner unfoldedFor many in the ballroom at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night, the scene was painfully familiar. Shots fired, confusion and panic, and a sense that the normal order of things had been violently interrupted.Erika Kirk, whose husband, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed last September, was in tears. Congressman Steve Scalise, majority leader in the House of Representatives who suffered life-threatening injuries in a shooting at a baseball practice with Republican teammates in 2017, was escorted out by security. So was Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who lost his father and uncle to assassin's bullets.Many journalists in attendance had been at the 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where an assailant opened fire on Donald Trump, grazing his ear, before being killed by a Secret Service sniper.In modern America, it seems, political violence has become an ever-present storm, that can strike anywhere, at any moment.Saturday night was the third time that Trump has been directly targeted – after the Butler attack and another attempt in 2024 at his Palm Beach golf resort. In a separate incident, the Secret Service killed an armed man trying to enter Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, although the president was not in Florida at the time.I was in the room with Trump and heard the low thudding sound of gunfireWhat we're learning about suspected Washington press dinner gunmanMelania Trump urges ABC to 'take stand' on Jimmy Kimmel after widow jokeThese incidents have become frequent enough that there is almost a routine to them. Trump, reflective, calls for unity and a cooling of political rhetoric. News coverage speculates about a "new tone" from the presiden...