Ryan Routh is the fruit of conspiracy-addled gun culture
MAGA's effort to blame Democratic rhetoric is absurd.
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It’s weird to say this, but the latest Trump assassination attempt is not really that interesting. That’s not to condone what happened nor to make light of it. Rather, it’s that people trying to shoot at Trump is the unfortunate consequence of a society where guns are far easier to get than, say, mental health treatment.
Rather than grapple with that, the Trump campaign is blaming the Harris/Walz campaign for “inflammatory” rhetoric. Yes, the same campaign that has basically forced an entire Ohio city to close its schools and city buildings for multiple days running because they’re receiving so many bomb threats thanks to the racist lies Trump and Vance keep spewing.
Since the gunman, Ryan Routh, didn’t actually shoot at Trump or anyone else, all he has been charged with are weapons offenses. As someone previously convicted of a felony, Routh is not eligible to possess a firearm. Additionally, one of his guns had the serial number scraped off.
Fun law fact: up until last month, charging Routh for having a gun with a scraped-off serial number would have been dicey. That’s because following the United States Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, courts have been at loose ends trying to apply Justice Clarence Thomas’s test of whether gun laws are “consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
In 2022, a federal judge in West Virginia concluded that since there were no serial numbers at the time of the Founding Fathers, it’s unconstitutional to ban people from obliterating serial numbers or possessing a gun with an obliterated serial number. The full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in August, but with two dissents. One of those was from Trump appointee and FedSoc member Judge Julius Richardson, who would have upheld the determination that a ban on scratching off serial numbers was unconstitutional and who groused about how the government made “minimal effort, at best, to show that firearms with removed, obliterated, or altered serial numbers are either dangerous or unusual, let alone both.”
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Were Routh not someone with a previous felony conviction and had he not had a gun with an obliterated serial number, it isn’t even clear what, exactly, he would have been charged with. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida got rid of even the most meager safety requirements, such as requiring a permit or undergoing training and a background check. Sure, it’s still against the law for a person with a felony conviction to have a gun, but what guardrails are left to stop him from getting one or two or a dozen?
None of this is stopping DeSantis from demanding that Florida take the investigation away from the federal government, not just because he’s sure the Deep State will bury the truth or whatever, but also so that Routh could be charged under state law with attempted murder and potentially serve life in prison. Good luck, buddy. Routh didn’t get a shot off and was roughly 300-500 yards from Trump when he was spotted. He wasn’t even trespassing, as he was on the public side of the golf course fence.
To get to life in prison, Florida would have to charge Routh with attempted first-degree felony murder and prove that he was attempting to kill Trump in the course of committing a different underlying crime like arson, burglary, or carjacking. DeSantis thinks he’ll get there by exploring “red flags” about Routh’s “associations, his motivations, and his ideology,” but even if Routh was a card-carrying Marxist who had been volunteering for the Harris campaign for months, it doesn’t make his behavior attempted murder.
It’s also rich for Republicans like DeSantis to pretend that the federal government wouldn’t pursue as much punishment as they could ladle onto Routh. We’re talking about a Department of Justice that, under President Joe Biden, spent years successfully prosecuting his son for having possessed a gun illegally for 11 days because he lied on the application for the weapon, saying he was not a drug user. Biden has already said he wouldn’t pardon his own son, so it is absurd to imagine the president and a shadowy cabal somehow overseeing giving Routh a pass.
A walking red flag
Of course, Routh’s associations, motivations, and ideology are, charitably, a mess.
Routh went to Ukraine to try to fight on behalf of that country after the Russian invasion. His efforts appear to have come to naught, with a source close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling ABC that Routh didn’t pass the psychological screening required to join the International Legion. Regardless, right-wingers think Routh’s affinity for Ukraine is slam-dunk evidence of his leftish leanings, but he voted for Trump in 2016, then pivoted to backing Tulsi Gabbard in 2020, then fantasized about a Nikki Haley–Vivek Ramaswamy ticket in 2024. But he’s also praised Biden and Harris. He’s a conspiracy theorist when it comes to China and covid. He wrote a lengthy self-published book, mostly about Ukraine, and in it told Iran that they were free to assassinate Trump.
This is not someone operating with a coherent political philosophy. But as difficult as it is to discern a pattern to his political views, it’s blindingly easy to discern why Routh shouldn’t have been able to get a gun. In April 2002, he was charged with having an explosive device. Just prior to his December 2002 conviction for that offense, he barricaded himself inside his business, along with a fully automatic machine gun, in a standoff with police for hours. For that, he was convicted of resisting arrest, carrying a concealed weapon, and driving after revocation. The automatic weapon possession was dismissed.
One report said Routh had multiple felony convictions for stolen goods from 1997 to 2010, though Markenzy Lapointe, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a briefing Monday that Routh’s past felony convictions were only in 2002 and 2010. Regardless, Routh wasn’t allowed to have firearms, period.
But we live in a country where JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, shrugged off a school shooting by saying it was a regrettable “fact of life,” mumbled nonsense about schools being “soft targets,” and said that Kamala Harris wants to “take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them.” We live in a country where Trump himself said, only 36 hours after a school shooting in Iowa, that they “have to get over it, we have to move forward.” We live in a country where one of Trump’s biggest supporters, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, chased down a survivor of the Parkland school shooting to harass him about meeting with senators about gun laws. We live in a country where another of Trump’s biggest supporters, Alex Jones, was ordered to pay over $1 billion in damages to Sandy Hook families after making their lives hell for years by claiming the shooting was a hoax and a “false flag.” And, of course, we live in a country where the Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have made it nearly impossible for most gun laws to stick.
Republicans really just want Dems to stop campaigning
Those are the reasons that it was easy for Routh to get a gun and, wrapped in delusions of grandeur, lay in wait for Trump. It’s not because Democrats are running ads about Project 2025 in swing states. It’s not because of the “inflammatory rhetoric” from Harris and Walz. Indeed, the Harris/Walz campaign is so measured in its criticism that even Trump can only come up with that they called him a “threat to democracy.” Vance declared it is far too inflammatory to call Trump a fascist, forgetting that Trump called Harris a fascist twice just in the last week.
The GOP, with its open embrace of violence and conspiracies, created the perfect environment for someone like Routh to end up exactly where he did: trying to attack Trump for incoherent reasons or perhaps no reason at all. As much as they’d like to make that the fault of Democrats, this is all theirs to own.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Thank you. I have been saying this is a story about lack of good gun control laws in Florida, and it should be tied to DeSatan and the way he runs his state, instead of making it another vehicle for giving Trump attention when he was not shot and and no one attempted to shoot him. Someone just may have had the opportunity, but Trump is fine. I also think it is a story about Christian Nationalists. The part where we know that in response to other people getting shot and killed and JDV is a cold fish about it Andra Watkins, who is knowledgable both about Christian Nationalism and about Project 2025 can explain it. She claims that one, it is about forcing suffering on people, so they get closer to God, and that JDV actually believes that God makes no mistakes, so get over being upset about God's will.
https://project2025istheocracy.substack.com/p/why-christian-nationalists-dont-care?utm_source=publication-search
https://project2025istheocracy.substack.com/p/christian-nationalists-suffering?utm_source=substack&publication_id=2096234&post_id=148978379&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false&r=f0qfn&triedRedirect=true
Since it is rumored that JDV wants to take over from DT if they get elected by using Article 25 to claim mental incompetence, we should be thinking about what having a Christian Nationalists as president will mean for us.
Have to say I laughed out loud at "This is not someone operating with a coherent political philosophy." Understatement is a very effective form of irony. Ryan Routh is so obviously unfit to own a firearm. Would he have been denied a permit in states other than Florida? I wonder.