Political Violence in America: Pointing Fingers Won’t Fix It
We like to tell ourselves that political violence is something the other side does. The numbers don’t really back that up — and blaming one camp while ignoring the rest is a good way to make sure nothing changes.
The Scoreboard Game Is Misleading
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A Justice Department study (quietly pulled from its site this year) showed that since 1990, far-right extremists were tied to about 227 lethal incidents and over 520 deaths. Far-left extremists had about 42 lethal incidents with 78 deaths.
On the surface that sounds like a slam-dunk: the far-right is the big problem.
But dig a little deeper:
– One event — the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — killed 168 people all by itself. – A huge chunk of the rest is race- or religion-motivated violence: Charleston AME Church, Pittsburgh synagogue, El Paso Walmart, Buffalo supermarket, Oak Creek Sikh temple. Those have long been tallied as “far-right” even though the motive was racial or religious hatred, not a right-vs-left policy agenda.
A Different Way to Slice the Data
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When you split out that hate-driven violence and look strictly at political motives: – Far-Right political violence: roughly 240–260 deaths in about 110 incidents (anti-government bombings, militia/sovereign-citizen ambushes, anti-abortion attacks)
– Far-Left political violence: roughly 78 deaths in about 42 incidents
Now the gap shrinks to about 3-to-1, not 6-to-1.
And if you count incidents instead of deaths — to keep one massive bombing from skewing things — the far-right still leads, but only about 110 vs 42 incidents.
Don’t Forget the Street-Level Protest Deaths
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The 2020–23 protest period around the George Floyd demonstrations saw about 30–40 deaths in roughly as many incidents — car-rammings, opportunistic shootings, bystanders caught up in the chaos. They’re usually not counted in the official extremist stats, but if we’re talking about politically-charged violence that took lives, they belong in the picture.
Add those deaths to the left/protest column and the ratio tightens further: far-right political ≈350 deaths vs far-left + protest ≈110–120 deaths.
My Take
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So yes — it is true the political right leads on this disgusting score board, but the idea that political violence is a one-party phenomenon is wishful thinking. Both fringes have killed for their causes, and unrest itself has proven deadly even without ideology attached.
Pointing fingers doesn’t stop bullets. We need to get out of the habit of treating violence like a partisan stat war and start treating it as what it is: a threat to everyone.
What Might Actually Help
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1. Call it out across the board. Leaders on the left and right have to condemn political violence every single time, without the “but what about…” game.
2. Separate the categories. Hate crimes, protest-related unrest, and true ideological terrorism are different beasts. We need honest data that makes those distinctions.
3. Prevent the next one. Focus on early-warning, local intervention, and law-enforcement tools that zero in on individuals showing signs they’re willing to kill for a cause — whatever that cause may be.
The Bottom Line
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America’s political-violence problem isn’t red or blue.
It’s a national security issue and a community-safety issue.
We either tackle it together, or we keep trading headlines after the next attack.