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These numbers seem a little low -- are recent-ish events included? I mean, if there are only twelve left-wing incidents I'm gonna guess that the two most recent attempts to assassinate a presidential candidate aren't in there? As I recall there were some other less credible but not insignificant attempts against Trump during his first term as well -- depending on your criteria I think you could get to half a dozen incidents of attempted violence against Trump alone!
Thomas Crooks was not a left-winger, so that assassination attempt wasn't left-wing political violence. In so far as Ryan Routh had intelligible political motivations and wasn't just insane, he was a single-issue Ukraine supporter. While that is left-coded in today's political climate, it isn't actually a left-right issue, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it left off a list of left-wing political violence.
Wikipedia has a section on Routh's politics more broadly, and they pretty much fit the pattern of "angry Democrat" (e.g. accusing Trump of wanting to "make Americans slaves again"). I'd count him, although not Crooks.
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I reject your premise -- you don't need to be a left-winger to do left-wing political violence. If you are trying to kill a (leading) right-wing political candidate, you are doing left-wing violence until proven otherwise. I'm mostly satisfied that Hinkley proved otherwise, although open to the possibility that he was bullshitting about trying to kill Carter -- it's a very unusual case though, and I can't think of any others offhand where somebody just wanted to kill somebody who was President.
Booth probably wouldn't have killed (checks notes) Seymour, and the two that you mention chose not to shoot at Biden.
Crazy though they may have been, they were left-wing and crazy.
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From what I saw the authors seemed to be making a reasonably good effort to include acts of left-wing violence. The J20 protests from January 20, 2017 were included, and before being sanitized made up a pretty hefty chunk of the left-wing table. Most of the... shall we say creative accounting with the dataset I believe will appear on the analysis end, not the data end. For example, doing a quick and dirty =COUNTIF of all right-wing events before removing all duplicate events. Because each individual actor got their own row, so four white nationalists beating up one hispanic guy was four rows, that would give a very distorted number no matter how you slice it. That is however, a perfectly valid way of inputting your raw data just so long as when you do the analysis of the data you account for it. On the other hand, counting four black guys beating up an elderly white woman and her disabled son as "right-wing violence" in the data is very misleading.
How many BLM related violent events were there? What about the dude that gunned down five cops?
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Or you know the entire summer of love. Did they count the killing of the retired police chief? Did they count the felony murder of that child molester in the Rittenhouse self defense? How bout the massive amount of arson?
How about the attempted murder in Oregon when they tried to burn a courthouse with people in it or the literally days of sieges?
What about the people that died in CHAZ.
The dems love to bring up J6 but it all pales compared to the summer of love. Trying to claim right wing violence is more is facially absurd.
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I think I'd count Sanford, Ferrier, Routh, and Monper as left-wing assassination plots on Trump. I wouldn't count Allen (apparently just nuts, claimed to have also sent ricin to Elizabeth II), Crooks (ideology unclear), Casap (neo-Nazi attempting to start a race war), or the various Iranian government operatives - indeed, I'd count Casap, though not any of the others, as right-wing.
Technically, Ferrier's assassination attempt wasn't violent (she mailed him ricin), and technically Routh and Monper didn't get around to taking actual violent actions. Sanford absolutely counts, though, and if you count all attempted murders as "violent" (as many statistics do) then Ferrier/Routh would as well (Monper didn't get around to anything I'd label an "attempt", because he was dumb enough to post on social media that he was going to commit a mass shooting).
TBQH I think that setting up to snipe a presidential candidate at a political rally is in and of itself prima facie an act of political violence -- absent overwhelming evidence to the contrary (as with (probably) Hinkley, for example) I don't see how you can tag it as "IDK, lol -- crazy people amirite?".
Yes, it counts as "political violence". But I wouldn't count it as "left-wing political violence".
I would, again presumptively -- it's certainly possible that somebody might try to shoot a right wing candidate for not being right wing enough or something, but absent some compelling evidence I'd assume that shooting at a political candidate is in itself a pretty good sign that you are on the opposite side of the spectrum.
Crooks was a registered Republican and some people who knew him said he was an outspoken conservative, although he did also donate $15 to ActBlue before that. You're right about the presumption (and I applied it to many of my inclusions), but the above suffices for me to declare it at least partially rebutted in Crooks' case. The obvious possibility raised by that info is "thought conservatism in the 'States would do better without Donald Trump leading it". Again, though, I wouldn't count it as "right-wing political violence" either; it's just not clear what the fuck he was thinking.
Allen and Crooks are the arguable ones, though.
What people? From what I've read, he functionally didn't have any friends and barely interacted with anyone outside coursework.
[...]
From a Guardian article.
Every single other person interviewed describes him as a weird loner who never expressed any personal details beyond a general anxiety about doing well in school. Do you really believe that this one memory from a random classmate of the weird loner standing on the side of the room with no other people is the dispositive proof of his sincere beliefs?
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