As U.S. politics grow more polarized, instances of targeted political violence are increasing. From the September 2025 shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Orem, to the killing of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman in June 2025, political assassinations of prominent figures have received widespread media coverage.
In July 2024, AP News reported that the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in Butler, PA was “the most serious attempt to kill a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.”
Many political scientists blame polarization and wealth inequality, among other factors, for the rise in cases of violence. Dr. Tyler Pack specializes in civil wars, ethnic conflicts and authoritarian regimes at the University of Utah. He described the increase in political violence since the 2010s.
“Both at the national and at state levels, there has been an uptick in political violence,” he said. “No matter how we define it, it’s gone up. How much it’s gone up depends past that.”
Pack explained the difficulty in measuring political violence is defining it, referring to the killings of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Dec. 2024, and Wesley LePatner, a Blackstone Executive who led the firm’s real estate investment trust business in July 2025.
“Part of the issue there is in how we measure it, because an assassination versus a murder depends on the public nature of a person,” he said. “For example, is a political assassination different from the healthcare CEO being killed, who’s not a political figure, but is involved in public policy?”
Pack pointed to polarization, wealth inequality, poor mental health treatment and high gun ownership as potential causes for the uptick in violence.
Political polarization
A 2024 Gallup poll shows that 80% of U.S. adults believe America is divided on “the most important values,” and Pack explained polarization has increased even more since the poll. “Some of partisanship comes not from Americans actually believing that different of things, but thinking they believe that different of things,” he said.
He also explained how political messaging from powerful figures in society, which he refers to as elites, has perpetuated a cycle of increasing polarization. “Part of it is individually driven, and then part of it is also definitely elite driven, where, if you get told by your leaders again and again how different and sometimes dangerous the other group is, and you haven’t met them, that’s your one assumption, because that’s the information you have,” Pack said.
Pack discussed the division of American society in a digital age, where in-person interactions with those of differing political views have decreased. “Self-sorting means that we don’t interact as often with people from the other party as we used to, and this was true before the pandemic,” he said. “We get into online echo chambers, [and] when we meet people in person, they tend to be people that we have similar political views with.”
Dr. Richard Medina of the U’s School of Environment, Society and Sustainability also discussed how a changing media climate through social media has contributed to the rise in polarization. “[Social media] is almost like a fire hose of information,” Medina said. “I think a lot of people are struggling to really understand what the truth is, or what reality is.”
Medina’s research focuses on political violence and hate crimes. He said that social media itself is not the problem, but blamed misinformation on social media as a cause for polarization. “It allows for more efficient delivery of information to a larger swath of the population,” he said. “So it’s not the social media that’s contributed to it [polarization], it’s the bad information.”
Wealth inequality
Medina also serves as director of the University of Utah’s HATER lab, a research group that specializes in political violence, hate crimes and societal issues such as inequality. He discussed how wealth inequality is a driving force in political violence. “I think there are a lot of people suffering right now,” he said. “When people suffer, you tend to have more violence.”
U.S. families in the bottom 50% of wealth holdings represent 3% of total wealth, while the top 10% hold more than 69% of wealth, according to the Congressional Budget Office in an October 2024 non-partisan analysis for Congress.
Medina pointed out how poverty itself does not promote political violence, rather the continuation of inequality is a societal stressor. “We need to remember that it’s not poverty that creates violence and terrorism in this way,” he said. “It’s actually the inequalities, economic inequalities, political inequalities, that really drive this kind of violence.”
Pack also discussed how wealth inequality contributes to political violence in the United States today. “You look at stagnating wages, and rising housing costs, and rising healthcare costs, and decreasing trust in the political system, which in theory, is how you would address all those other things,” Pack said. “You stack those frustrations on top of each other, and you have these multiple reinforcing grievances.”
He said this can lead to broader mistrust in government institutions, which is likely to increase the propensity for violence. “Inequality breeds grievance, that’s what it does,” Pack said. “Very few people look at inequality, particularly large amounts of inequality, and are satisfied with that, unless they believe that they’re on the way up.”
Both Pack and Medina said that inequality, when left unaddressed, can continue to promote long term instability and unrest.
Mental health and guns
Pack pointed to more societal conditions in the U.S. that promote political violence, including gun ownership and a poor mental health system. “We have the highest amount of guns per capita in the world,” he said. “You don’t need high tech weaponry. For example, it was a hunting rifle in the Charlie Kirk shooting.”
He also emphasized how these conditions lead to increased instances of mass shootings, particularly school shootings. “We have an imperfect mental health care system in the U.S., and a significant number of people who engage in violence have either untreated or no longer treated mental health issues,” he added.
Pack warned about continued normalization of gun violence in the U.S., regardless of political nature or not. “I worry more about it continuing to grow gradually, and us just kind of resigning ourselves to the fact that, ‘I guess this is politics in the U.S. now,’ which would not be a healthy place to be,” he said.
