SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
violence
Let’s Not Use a Lone Crime to Justify Ongoing Crimes Against Humanity
The mainstream U.S. media has responded to the murder of two Israeli Embassy employees in D.C. by intensifying its campaign to associate the Palestine solidarity movement with antisemitism and violence.
Jun 02, 2025
Was the Washington D.C. attack antisemitic?
In the U.S. mainstream media, that question isn’t even asked—the answer, apparently, goes without saying. The alleged assassin said, “Free, free Palestine,” participated in protests against Israel’s war against Gaza, and shared or authored a social media post that “condemned the Israeli and American governments and what it called atrocities committed by the Israeli military against Palestinians.” The victims were Israeli embassy employees.
Mainstream media, and the U.S. bipartisan consensus, criminalize protest by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, conflating emotional distress with harassment, and conflating disruption—no matter how peaceful—with violence.
After describing these facts (and distancing itself from the well-documented fact that the Israeli military was committing atrocities against Palestinians), The New York Times immediately asked, “Has there been a rise in antisemitic attacks?” Like the major organizations that track “antisemitic incidents,” the Times does not distinguish between incidents that target Israel and its policies, and incidents that target Jews. The Times thus joins the bipartisan consensus that has increasingly made it impossible to name or protest Israel’s daily unfolding crimes against humanity without being accused of antisemitism.
I don’t have any inside information on Elias Rodriguez’s motives, beyond his words at the scene and the manifesto attributed to him. Neither these sources nor the evidence compiled by the FBI and the Times provide any hints of antisemitism. Instead, they express his outrage at Israeli atrocities in Gaza. But that didn’t stop the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, and other sources from leaping to the conclusion.
When Does a Movement Get Blamed for a Lone Shooter?
The incident bears comparison to Luigi Mangione’s alleged shooting of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, in December 2024. In both cases, the accused declared a clear political motive for the killing. In both cases, the alleged killers expressed political sentiments widely shared in the U.S. population: outrage at health insurance companies for their callous treatment of their customers, and outrage at Israel for its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
A smaller portion of the population has actually mobilized for change in both areas, organizing for Medicare for All and for a cease-fire, aid, and justice for Palestinians.
There is one big contradiction in the coverage though. In the Luigi Mangione case, the press reported on the outpouring of popular support for his act of rage with sympathy. “The crux of their support is based on a deep resentment and anger at the American healthcare system and insurance companies,” wrote CNN. “Mr. Mangione has inspired documentaries about his life and remains a topic of interest on social media. The GiveSendGo fund-raising page for his defense has reeled in donations and a steady stream of supportive notes,” commented The New York Times.
If anyone has normalized violence, it is the United States, with the world’s largest military spending, its largest military-industrial complex, its endless wars, its worldwide bases, and its non-stop glorification of military power and insistence on Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
Nor were his supporters criminalized or denounced. The Times was more bemused than critical in its reporting on rallies and protests supporting Mangione. The newspaper openly acknowledged that “UnitedHealthcare has long been the target of fury for denying claims, and has faced scrutiny for using algorithms to refuse coverage” and explained that protesters saw the murder as “a blow against America’s profit-driven healthcare system.”
Still, Mangione was consistently portrayed as a lone individual. Never once was he associated with the Medicare for All movement. Nor was the Medicare for All movement blamed for his act of violence. In fact, it wasn’t even mentioned in the massive coverage.
Not so for Elias Rodriguez. The Times framed the D.C. murders as the problem of the Palestine solidarity movement. “Pro-Palestinian Movement Faces an Uncertain Path After D.C. Attack,” it declared ominously, days after the attack. “The slaying of two Israeli Embassy workers cast a harsh spotlight on pro-Palestinian groups in the United States.” The Times noted that Rodriguez “chanted the same slogan, in the same cadence” that was chanted in college protests (“Free, free Palestine”) and wondered whether he was “influenced by more extreme pro-Palestinian organizations that reach Americans online and that glorify the actions of Hamas and other armed resistance groups.”
“Even peaceful protests,” the Times warned, might influence “attitudes against people connected to Israel.”
Equating Palestinian Rights With Violence
Well aware that they would be the first to be blamed, Palestine rights organizations “rushed to condemn” the attack. Nevertheless, the Times appeared obsessed with uncovering support for violence among them. “Protesters who chant ‘Free, free Palestine’ are almost always using tactics of nonviolent resistance. But the groups that organize behind Free Palestine banners also vary in their philosophies. Some advocate complete nonviolence in their broader approach, akin to anti-war protesters. Others back the right of Palestinians to engage in armed resistance against Israel, which they consider a right under international law, because they consider Israel the occupier of Palestinian lands.”
Consider? In fact armed resistance against occupation is a right under international law, and Israel does occupy Palestinian lands.
That’s not enough for the Times, though. Acceptable organizations must “advocate complete nonviolence.” Apparently, believing that international law permits violence under some circumstances also counts as “violence”?
But more to the point: The Times acknowledges that the protestors “almost always” use nonviolent tactics. It doesn’t give any examples here of the supposed “violent” exceptions, but Times editorial write Nicholas Kristof gives a hint when he chides student protesters because “peaceful protests have tipped into occupations of buildings, risks to commencements, and what I see as undue tolerance of antisemitism, chaos, vandalism, and extremism.” So, occupying a building or protesting at a commencement now counts as “violence”? Have Kristof and his colleagues never heard of civil disobedience?
Opposing Wars vs Commitment to Nonviolence
I have been attending anti-war protests since 1967 when my parents took me to a protest against the Vietnam War. I knew little about the concept of nonviolence, but I knew that dropping bombs on peasant villages a world away was wrong. It was drizzling. Some counterprotestors threw raw eggs at us, and some egg splashed on my raincoat. My mother said something along the lines of, “You know we are on the right side because we are standing here quietly, and they are the ones throwing things at us.” It felt like a microcosm of what I understood about the U.S. and Vietnam: The U.S. was on the wrong side because it was the one throwing the bombs.
Since that day I’ve been to many anti-war protests. My life has been shaped by an almost constant drumbeat of U.S. (and U.S.-funded or supported) wars in lands distant and not-so-distant, and I have protested many of them, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and now Gaza.
Over the years I’ve worked with many people whose politics are based on a commitment to nonviolence. I respect them deeply. But my politics has always been based more on the particulars: In the unequal wars where the U.S. is the clear aggressor, I want to make it stop.
I could say that I condemn every murder that has ever taken place since the beginning of time. But that’s a politically meaningless statement.
Vietnam Veteran Brian Willson was one of those people who believed deeply in nonviolence. In 1987—20 years after my first anti-war protest—he lay down on the train tracks to disrupt the trains carrying munitions from the Concord Naval Weapons Station, headed for El Salvador and the Contras in Nicaragua. For most of us, that seemed like the ultimate act of nonviolence: placing his body on the line to obstruct war. Today, commentators seem to conflate such “disruption” with violence.
That day, instead of slowing down and waiting for police to remove the protesters, the train sped up and ran over Willson, tearing off his legs.
I wasn’t there, but I joined the protest in Concord the following weekend when outraged protesters began to literally tear up the bloodied tracks with their bare hands. I hung back—not out of any moral predicament over whether physical destruction of the machinery of war was “violent” or “justified” but simply scared by (even though I shared) the rage of the crowd. Still, I gladly accepted a rusted tie nail that someone offered me. It still sits on the mantlepiece in my living room.
We live in a world, and a country, in which violence in the form of war is utterly normalized. Politicians, institutions, and holidays honor those who engage in military violence, and almost all of us are forced to be complicit in it. The manufacture of weapons of mass destruction is central to our economy. And we are in the midst of a U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza. Yet business leaders, politicians, and the media obsess endlessly instead over parsing the language of protesters to uncover evidence of their lack of commitment to nonviolence.
Is Israel’s “Right to Defend Itself” a Justification for Violence?
Since October 7 it’s almost impossible to find a U.S. mainstream media outlet or politician—from former President Joe Biden to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to current President Donald Trump—or pundit—from conservative centrist David Brooks to the mainstream liberal Ezra Klein—who doesn’t qualify even the mildest critique of Israel by insisting that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” None of them adopts a principled adherence to nonviolence.
Yet, they agree that Palestinians must make that commitment and accept a “demilitarized Palestinian state.” They never speak of a future Palestinian state’s right to defend itself.
Criminalizing Protest: Media Complicity
Mainstream media, and the U.S. bipartisan consensus, criminalize protest by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, conflating emotional distress with harassment, and conflating disruption—no matter how peaceful—with violence.
Here’s how the Times summarized the campus protests in March 2025:
Much of the on-campus protest at Columbia was peaceful. But as both the encampment and the students’ fervor grew, some students and members of the faculty said they felt the already much-disputed lines between anti-Zionism and antisemitism were blurring beyond distinction. Many Jewish students said they felt fearful on campus because of chants, signs, and literature at the encampment that sometimes expressed support for the Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. There were also specific allegations of antisemitism and an uproar when video surfaced online of a student protest leader saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” (He was later suspended.)
Note how the Times blurs “feelings,” “antisemitism,” and violence.
Amidst the hysteria about “violence,” nonviolent protest has increasingly been criminalized in the United States—beginning with forms of protest against Israel. Well before October 7, nonviolent protest in the form of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement was criminalized, as was much discussion of Israel. Using the word “genocide,” accusing Israel of racism, comparing Israel’s eliminationist campaign against Palestinians to the Holocaust, calling Zionism a form of racism—are all prohibited by legal definitions of antisemitism. Meanwhile the Trump administration has begun to detain and deport noncitizen Palestine activists on vague charges that their beliefs “condoning antisemitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine” American foreign policy. How, then, can anyone protest against Israeli violence?
Is Protest Harassment?
Alex Gourevitch recently pointed out that campus and police crackdowns on protests on the grounds that they were loud, disruptive, refused to disperse, or made some students feel fearful essentially eliminate the right to protest altogether. As Gourevitch explains, “Feelings of unease would never suffice to meet the legal standard of a ‘hostile environment.’ Proving that one has been threatened or harassed requires objective evidence, not just a subjective sense of fear.”
Antidiscrimination laws prohibit creating a “hostile work environment.” But Gourevitch emphasizes that “whatever the proper domain of the hostile environment concept, it was never meant to (and shouldn’t) extend to protest. It is not just that protests involve political expression. They are a particular kind of political expression: public expressions of hostility toward political views and often the people who hold them. If applied to speech in the context of protest, the hostile environment standard—or any norm that takes feelings of fear and insecurity as grounds for intervention—would make protest impossible.”
Who Are the Real Purveyors of Violence?
If anyone has normalized violence, it is the United States, with the world’s largest military spending, its largest military-industrial complex, its endless wars, its worldwide bases, and its non-stop glorification of military power and insistence on Israel’s “right to defend itself.” And it’s Israel, with its now 19-month genocidal attack on Gaza, where 82% of the country’s Jewish population supports the expulsion of the entire Palestinian population and the government has openly declared that goal.
Schoolchildren may know Martin Luther King Jr. as a paragon of nonviolence. But few understand his explanation of nonviolence in his1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” His decision to speak out against the U.S. war in Vietnam, he said “grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North… As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems… that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” His point was not to “justify” urban violence in the U.S., but to emphasize the need to confront large-scale, structural violence.
If we oppose violence, let’s not focus on demonizing those who are trying to stop the violence. Let’s not criminalize a wide range of nonviolent activities—including protesting, disrupting, occupying, writing, and speaking—aimed at naming, and stopping, a genocide. Let’s not grant impunity to those dropping the bombs. Let’s not allow a country—Israel—to get away with mass murder just because it claims to represent Jews. And let’s not use a lone crime—the murders in D.C.—to justify ongoing crimes against humanity.
John F. Kennedy said that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” It’s hard not to look back on those words with some irony, given the overwhelming ways that U.S. Cold War policy in Latin America used violence, time and time again, to crush dissent there. But in today’s climate, many of us would fear the consequences of making such a statement.
I could say that I condemn every murder that has ever taken place since the beginning of time. But that’s a politically meaningless statement. I’m more interested in joining those trying to stop the mass murder and starvation in Gaza that’s being spurred by my government and paid for with my tax money—the murders that maybe, just maybe, we can do something about.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How Does Copaganda Work and Why Is It Harmful?
Copaganda contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
May 17, 2025
Copaganda is a specific type of propaganda in which the punishment bureaucracy and the powerful interests behind it influence how we think about crime and safety. I use the term “punishment bureaucracy” instead of “criminal justice system” in this book because it is a more accurate and less deceptive way to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law. The government determines what things are considered a “crime” subject to punishment versus what things are permitted or tolerated even if they hurt people. Then, the government determines what kinds of punishments are appropriate for the conduct it prohibits. Across history and different societies, the definition of crime and how it should be punished has varied depending on who has power and what serves their interests, not an objective evaluation of what causes harm.
The powerful define crime to suit their interests, making some things legal and others punishable. They also decide how what is criminalized gets punished. Should the government execute or cage or whip people who break a law? Should the government mandate a public apology, permit survivors to initiate restorative processes, seize assets, require volunteer work, revoke a business or driver’s license, confine someone to their home, banish them? Should society show them love and give them help? Should society instead invest more in preventing certain harms from happening in the first place?
Having defined crime and punishment, the government also determines which crimes to enforce against which people. “Law enforcement” rarely responds to most violations of the law. It only enforces some criminal laws against some people some of the time.
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities.
These decisions, too, follow patterns of power, not safety. That is why U.S. police chose for many years to arrest more people for marijuana possession than for all “violent crime” combined. That is why police prioritize budgets for SWAT teams to search for drugs in poor communities over testing rape kits. That is why the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office responded to proposed county budget cuts by threatening to cut the divisions that handle white-collar crimes and sexual abuse. That is why about 90 percent of people prosecuted for crimes are very poor. That is why no senior figures were prosecuted for the 2008 financial crisis or the U.S. torture program after 9/11. That is why police tolerate widespread drug use in dorms at Ivy League universities. That is why most of the undercover police operations in hundreds of U.S. cities target disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrant people instead of other police officers, prosecutors, real estate developers, fraternities with histories of drug distribution and rape, or corporate board rooms with histories of tax evasion, fraud, and insider trading. That is why a playground fight at a low-income school results in a child being taken away from their parents and jailed with a criminal record, while the same fight at a prep school may result in a call to parents for an early pickup that afternoon.
In an unequal society where a few have more money and power than the many, the punishment bureaucracy is a tool for preserving inequalities. It maintains the social order by using government violence to manage the unrest that comes from unfairness, desperation, and alienation, and it crushes organized opposition against the political system. These functions explain why the punishment bureaucracy expands during times of growing inequality and social agitation. Throughout history, those who are comfortable with how society looks tend to preserve and expand the punishment bureaucracy, even though—and largely because—it operates as an anti-democratic force. Those who have wanted to change certain aspects of our society—such as movements for workers, racial justice, women’s suffrage, economic equality, peace, ecological sustainability, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on—have tended throughout history to combat the size, power, and discretion of the punishment bureaucracy. Why? Because it is almost always wielded against them.
So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles.
Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat
The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined—such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies—costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That’s over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time, most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure “safety” as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or robbery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn’t pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclu- sively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money.
Job #2: Manufacturing Fear
The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of “crime waves” concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near-historic fifty-year lows the entire time. As a result of continual news-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling.
Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.) This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear.
Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution
The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people’s lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as “disorder” solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option.
If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, as I discuss later, greater investment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police-recorded crime. Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as “crime.”
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
As you read the examples collected in this book with the above three themes in mind, ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years, and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance.
Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission and please note that it is not available for re-posting elsewhere.
Keep ReadingShow Less
America’s Safety Is Fragile; Trump Is Tearing Down the Systems That Protect It
The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight.
May 05, 2025
America in 2025 is safer than it’s been in years. After a devastating surge during the early pandemic—when the U.S. homicide rate rose more than 30%—homicide rates have since plummeted. In 2024 alone, they dropped 16% nationally, one of the sharpest declines since the FBI began keeping national data.
This progress isn’t happenstance. It’s the direct result of deliberate investments in policy, research, and community-led strategies that addressed the underlying reasons for crime and violence. This progress is now under direct assault as the Trump administration has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. In the last two weeks, the Justice Department canceled hundreds of critical grants to local governments and community organizations that fund violence prevention and public safety programs. Hundreds of National Science Foundation grants were terminated, including my own, following infiltration from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. If these rollbacks continue, we risk reversing years of progress and returning to a more violent, less stable future.
In Camden, New Jersey—where I teach at Rutgers University and serve as director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center—the turnaround has been particularly dramatic. Just over a decade ago, Camden was written off as the “murder capital of the country.” In 2013, the small city of 75,000 people saw 57 homicides. In 2024, that number dropped to 17—a historic low. Today, fewer families are grieving, and fewer children are growing up in the shadow of violence. For a city long abandoned by political will and public imagination, this transformation offers a lesson in what’s possible when communities and institutions work together.
We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage.
The progress in Camden was not inevitable. It was built—piece by piece—through hard-won investments in community violence prevention and a complete overhaul of the city’s police force. And in recent years, we’ve seen similar progress unfold across the country in reducing violence—driven by a surge in federal investment and coordination.
In the wake of the pandemic, the Biden administration invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the kind of labor-intensive work that makes communities safer through the Community-Based Violence Intervention Initiative and provisions within the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Laws were passed to extend background checks, implement life-saving red flag laws, and crack down on gun traffickers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulated ghost guns and the kits used to assemble them, curbing the surge of untraceable firearms on our streets. The White House even established an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to lead these efforts. Federal funding allowed grassroots organizations to hire street outreach workers and get help to those affected by violence before more harm was done.
States and cities followed suit, creating their own offices of violence prevention and refocusing law enforcement efforts on the those at highest risk while improving community relations. For the first time in decades, a coherent, multi-sector approach to safety led by the federal government was beginning to take hold. It was working.
All of that is now under threat.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. The administration’s attacks are wide-ranging but the bigger picture is what matters. These aren’t isolated cuts or rollbacks. Taken together, they amount to a deliberate dismantling of the very infrastructure that underpins public safety in this country.
On his first day in office, Trump shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated massive layoffs, including nearly the entire Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Programs that tracked injuries and deaths—like the Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS)—have gone dark. Researchers at universities across the country have had their federal funding frozen, stalled, or revoked, often with no official explanation. A group of House Republicans, led by Rep. Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, has even called for a complete ban on federal research aimed at preventing gun violence—an attack not just on science, but on the very idea that violence is a problem we can solve.
The Department of Justice has also reversed course. A zero-tolerance policy for lawbreaking gun dealers, established under the Biden administration, has been eliminated. The result: Dealers who sell firearms without background checks or falsify records are now far less likely to lose their licenses. Attorney General Pam Bondi is reviewing lifesaving gun regulations, including a rule closing the gun show loophole and a ban on certain AR-style firearm attachments used in mass shootings. These policies were hard-fought and evidence-based. Now, they’re on the chopping block.
None of this is abstract. Research, policy, and funding are what make real-world safety possible. Without them, outreach workers and police officers can’t do their jobs. Emergency room partnerships break down. Communities lose tools to anticipate and prevent violence. Safety doesn’t just happen. It is produced through effort, coordination, and care. And when those systems collapse, people die.
Violence is not just a crime issue. It is a preventable threat to public health, even if the administration denies it. It spreads, it scars, and it sickens. It takes our children, hurts those who are most marginalized, and it divides us. The recent gains in safety are fragile—hard-earned, but easily reversed. If the systems that made that progress possible are dismantled, the violence will return. We can’t take this moment for granted, and we cannot afford to stand by while it’s undone.
We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage. The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight. The cost is too great. The consequences, unthinkable. It’s time to reclaim public safety as a public good, and to fight—loudly—for the systems that make peace possible.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular