“Today, Mr President, we’re all Republicans”

When President Reagan lay on the operating table having lost half his blood after being shot in 1981, he told the masked surgeons: “Please tell me you’re Republicans”.

The lead surgeon, a life-long Democrat, responded to the brave joke with the words in the title above. That wasn’t just a witty and noble response. It was accurate political analysis.

An attempt to kill a president starts a wave of sympathy carrying even many former detractors on its crest – especially if the target responds with courage. Reagan was seriously wounded: the bullet had punctured his lung, and he had difficulty breathing. He still found the strength to smile at his wife Nancy and chuckle: “Honey, I forgot to duck”.

The assassination attempt happened shortly after Reagan had been inaugurated to his first term. John Hinckley’s shot and the president’s response to it made a second term practically guaranteed – and would have done even if Reagan’s record hadn’t been as good as it was.

Political assassinations have political consequences, and what happened yesterday won’t provide an exception to that rule.

Donald Trump wasn’t wounded as seriously as Ronald Reagan – Thomas Matthew Crooks’s bullet only grazed his ear. But the former president’s response was as courageous, if expressed in his own manner, not Reagan’s. Trump waved aside the bevy of Secret Service agents rushing to drag him off the stage, raised his fist above his bloodied face and shouted “Fight!”.

There, that’s the election sewn up. For gunfire, and courage under it, occupy a special place in the American heart. It was the gun that created the American nation, and it was the gun that delivered half the continent to it.

The first settlers keeping the tomahawk-wielding natives at bay, the revolutionaries taking on the British army, the Indian fighters during the westward expansion, the Yankees and the Rebs killing one another to put the finishing touches on the Constitution – the American nation entered the world stage to the accompaniment of gunshots.

Americans see the gun as a guarantor of their freedom, from foreign invaders and domestic tyrants alike. This is canonised in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and it’s a culture that older European countries have difficulty getting their heads around.

Americans don’t care. They might have come from Europe, but they aren’t Europeans any longer. In fact, many of them agree with their novelist John Dos Passos, who said: “Repudiation of Europe is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.”

A culture in which the gun has a significant role to play is bound to feature assassination as a way of settling political differences. Four US presidents have been shot dead while in office – by comparison, only one prime minister of Britain, a much older country, suffered the same fate (Spencer Perceval in 1812).

In addition to the successful assassinations of presidents and other politicians, there have been many unsuccessful attempts as well. Altogether, at least 60 American politicians have been fatally shot in the country’s history, which is pretty good going for a young nation. Add to this the scores of unsuccessful attempts, and the context of Donald Trump’s shooting becomes clear.

This has everything to do with culture and nothing to do with the availability of guns. Until relatively recently, guns were as widely available in Britain as in the US. A hundred years ago, British commercial and other travellers routinely packed revolvers next to toothbrushes in their luggage, and handguns were completely banned only in 1996. And yet this never produced a free season on politicians.

Every time a widely publicised shooting occurs in America, there’s clamour to repeal the Second Amendment and ban all or most of the guns in private ownership. Apart from the practical infeasibility of confiscating such a vast number of weapons (393 million at the last count), such calls betray ignorance of, perhaps even contempt for, the national culture, as formed over the past 400 years.

Some other reactions to the attempt on Trump’s life are already in the public domain, and they range from legitimate to insane. The latter category includes insistence that Trump himself staged the botched assassination to boost his electoral chances.

We are still awaiting the results of forensic investigation, but even the preliminary frame-by-frame analysis of the assassination videos evokes the 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth.

There a professional hitman has President De Gaulle in his crosshairs, but just as he pulls the trigger De Gaulle moves his head and the bullet misses him by a whisker. Apparently, exactly the same happened this time: Trump turned his head just as Crooks fired, which made the bullet hit the target’s ear, not the middle of his forehead.

Suggesting that something like this could have been staged takes a madman or a fanatical Trump-hater, which is the same thing: any fanaticism presupposes a mental disorder. Yet legitimate questions do remain, and I hope we’ll get some answers soon.

First, how could a killer toting a rifle find himself on a roof a mere 150 yards from the presidential candidate? A Secret Service sniper instantly shot Crooks after the shots were fired – if the lawman was able to identify the shooter and draw a bead on him seconds after the attempt, why hadn’t he seen him seconds before? Was the protection detail spread too thin? Does this have anything to do with Biden’s attempts to have Secret Service protection removed from Trump following his trial?

It’s tempting to ascribe this crime to the divisive nature of current American politics, something on which I commented the other day. Yet this temptation must be resisted, even though the Democrats routinely portray Trump as a fascist and an existential threat to freedom. Republicans, especially those of the MAGA variety, respond in kind, which puts even more electrical charges into the thunderous political atmosphere.

However, anyone who looks at the hundreds of American assassination attempts I’ve mentioned, including the 60 successful ones, will find it hard to find a common political thread running through all of them, or to ascribe them to a particular political climate.

It’s true that the current scene is more polarised than any I’ve ever seen in a rather long lifetime, but pot shots have been taken at American politicians at all sorts of historical moments and for all sorts of reasons. Reagan, for example, was hated by many ‘liberals’, but he was shot not by one of them, but by a deranged man who wanted to impress the actress Jody Foster.

Kennedy was cordially detested by American conservatives, but it wasn’t one of them firing from the window of the Dallas Book Depository. In fact, Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist.

Anyway, let’s not second-guess the forthcoming investigation and try to predict its outcome. Predicting the outcome of the November election, on the other hand, is easier.

Trump was probably on course to win it anyway, but the physical courage he showed yesterday will put even more wind into his sails. He may well be unstoppable now, which I doubt was Crooks’s intent.