Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has studied American attitudes toward political violence since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, conducted a nationwide poll on the topic last month. It found that 10% of those surveyed said that the “use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.” A third of those who gave that answer also said they owned a gun.
Seven percent of those surveyed said they “support force to restore Trump to the presidency.” Half of them said they owned guns.
The shooting at Trump’s rally “is a consequence of such significant support for political violence in our country,” Pape wrote in an email. “Indeed, significant lone wolf attacks motivated by political violence have been growing for years in the United States, against members of Congress from both parties as well as federal officials and national leaders.”
Other studies on political violence have also found small but not insignificant numbers of Americans who support the idea of using violence to advance political ideas.
In October, the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, published a report that found nearly 14% of those surveyed strongly agreed that there would be a civil war in the United States in the next few years.
Nearly 8% of respondents to the study said they believed there would be a situation in the next few years where political violence would be justified and were intending to arm themselves.