On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) commented on the shooting in Minnesota earlier in the day by saying that “what is happening now with Donald Trump in charge is a fetishization of violence, a celebration of violence. It starts when he loses the election and decides to use violence to try to install himself in power permanently. It’s his response to an unsecure border. It’s the people with guns patrolling the capital city.” And argued that “ultimately plays out in the way that broken brains start to contemplate the way to exorcise their demons as well.”
Host Chris Hayes said, “I was sort of haunted by the image of these kids in the pews, being shot at in a nation where there’s more guns than people juxtaposed with, like, our guardsmen in their safety vests, in full camouflage, and then some federal agents with, like, long guns stopping people with their IDs in D.C. And it just feels like both sides of these pictures are completely wrong. Like, the protection and safety isn’t where we want it and then the menace is not where we want it either. And this feels like the perfect encapsulation of this moment right now.”
Murphy responded, “Yeah, the long story of the human race is a story about a reduction in violence, right? We are a violent species. We’ve used violence over the millennia in order to advance ourselves and protect ourselves. But we made a decision long ago that that’s not how we wanted to live. And so, we decided to put in place a set of rules and norms that made violence much less likely, and that’s been our story in the United States and across the world.”
Murphy continued, “But what is happening now with Donald Trump in charge is a fetishization of violence, a celebration of violence. It starts when he loses the election and decides to use violence to try to install himself in power permanently. It’s his response to an unsecure border. It’s the people with guns patrolling the capital city. And so, you now have a country that sees violence, lethality, lethality, lethality as the way to deal with almost every problem. And that ultimately plays out in the way that broken brains start to contemplate the way to exorcise their demons as well. So, we just need to get back to what Steven Pinker called our better angels, and that’s the hard work of trying to find ways other than violence to deal with conflict. Donald Trump is engaged in a daily celebration of violence, and that has impacts on our politics and on our culture.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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