Melissa and Mark Hortman

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/opinion/political-violence-hortman-minnesota.html

("The Nation Encourages Political Violence By Allowing It to Seem Normal")

Gun violence has become an accepted part of our everyday vocabulary. Gone are the days of outrage, the efforts to translate our distress into action. Even Gabby Gifford and Mark Kelly are fighting against a headwind too strong to hear their passionate pleas.

And of course, the rhetoric of Mr. Trump acts as accelerant. His lack of any semblance of compassion for victims, combined with his language filled with hate, dripping with disdain and demanding the worst from those who treat his vituperation as gospel, results in a landscape where random acts of violence are not random at all.

We become inured, hardened to each new assault upon our senses. No longer seeming to have the room to absorb and respond to each insult to morality. And with that lack of attention to each new detail comes the increased possibility of the spread of this our national disease, national disgrace.

Try next month to name the Minnesota politician and her husband killed this week.

Mr. Trump and his party have done this country no favor in their response to an epidemic that has now become just another fact of life, and death, in this country.

Melissa and Mark Hortman, in case you had already forgotten.