As you are no doubt already aware, a man was detained for his attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump at his West Palm Beach golf club. Secret Service agents opened fire at the would-be assassin after spotting the barrel of a rifle poking through a chain link fence bordering the property. The gunman fled the scene, and was pulled over on the highway an hour later thanks to a tip from a sharp-eyed witness. The foiled attempt is the second on Trump’s life, following the Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally shooting that sent a bullet through Trump’s ear, killing one attendee and injuring three others.
By Monday morning, many questions remain unanswered. Here’s what we know so far:
The suspected gunman has been identified. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, is a Hawaii resident with a long criminal history and a breathless focus on the war in Ukraine. He had multiple run-ins with the law, including an arrest for barricading himself in a location with a machine gun in an armed standoff with police, according to reporting from CNN. He spent much of the last four years advocating for volunteers to join the war effort in Ukraine, and went there himself to support it as a civilian.
Police recovered an AK-47-style rifle from the scene. The gunman had positioned himself in the treeline of the golf course, up against a chain link fence. After he fled, Secret Service agents recovered an AK-47-style rifle fitted with a scope, along with two backpacks and a GoPro camera. It was not immediately clear how even with his record, he was able to obtain the rifle. The backpacks were filled with ceramic plates — a type of body armor that can be used to defend against rifle fire.
We don’t know the motive. Investigators haven’t publicly speculated on a motive behind the assassination attempt. Routh was a registered Democrat who had been a vocal critic of the former president on social media, but little is known about what drove him to attempt the shooting. We also don’t know whether he had plotted the attack far in advance.
Questions remain about how a shooter was able to get so close. As a current candidate who previously served as president, Trump receives a smaller Secret Service detail than he did when he occupied the Oval Office. In response to a question about how a gunman was able to get within shooting range of the former president, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said it simply isn’t possible for Trump’s comparatively smaller detail to cover an entire golf course. Law enforcement officials said they were able to intercept the potential shooter by staying one or two holes ahead of Trump.
Experts were concerned about potential political violence around the 2024 election. As The Trace previously reported, a February Department of Homeland Security analysis warned that “threat actors intent on harming Americans through the use of violence may become more aggressive as Election Day approaches.” Garen Wintemute, head of the California Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis, has been surveying Americans about their willingness to engage in political violence. Last year, he reported that a third of respondents believed violence was justified to advance political objectives.
After the July assassination attempt, Wintemute told Vox: “Right after the assassination attempt I got asked, did you think this was going to happen, what happened to Donald Trump in Pennsylvania? You can’t predict the specifics, but for weeks, I’d been ending every day, thinking: Wow, we made it another day. Yes, it’s going to happen. With that same level of certainty, I think it will happen again.”
From The Trace
- Arkansas’s Many Shooting Victims Share a Single Trauma Center. This Researcher Wants to Change That: Nakita Lovelady grew up in a county with some of the highest rates of gun violence homicide in the nation. Now, the hospital violence intervention program she established is working to spread resources throughout the region.
- How the Supreme Court Broadened the Second Amendment: As The Trace launches a series about the court’s 2022 Bruen decision, we break down the ruling — and explain how it fundamentally changed our country’s approach to restricting guns.
- More Than a Thousand Felons Have Challenged Their Gun Bans Since the Supreme Court’s Bruen Decision: No group has used the decision more often than people whose felony records bar them from possessing guns.
- The Trace Wins National Murrow Award for ‘The Gun Machine’ Podcast: The award coincides with finalist recognition from the Online News Association and the Institute for Nonprofit News.
What to Know Today
Wittenberg University canceled all activities at its Springfield, Ohio, campus on Sunday and moved classes online today over threats of shootings and other violence related to the GOP presidential ticket’s false claims about the city’s Haitian immigrants. Clark State College similarly went online this week. Government offices, schools, hospitals, and other institutions in Springfield have been subject to a string of threats since former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, began broadcasting the baseless rhetoric. Asked about the claims during a CNN interview on Sunday, Vance admitted that he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail. [Springfield News-Sun/The Columbus Dispatch/The Guardian/The New York Times]
A July report from the Illinois Department of Public Health found that people experiencing homelessness are almost three times more likely to be murdered than other residents in the state. The recent mass shooting on a Chicago-area commuter train illustrates the dangers unhoused community members face. [Block Club Chicago]
Amid a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans in 2021, members of Oakland, California’s Chinatown community — including victims of attacks and robberies — called for expanded policing and more robust prosecution of criminals. As violent crime declines in the area, some are rethinking the approach, hoping to focus on root causes instead. [The Oaklandside]
The 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, which collects information on crimes that are both reported and unreported to police, was released last week. What does it tell us about violent crime trends? [Jeff Asher]
A new study led by an Oregon Health & Science University professor concluded that mental illness is not a significant driver of America’s high firearm death rates compared to other high socio-demographic countries, and instead pointed to widespread gun ownership. Researchers examined the prevalence of mental disorders with firearm death rates in countries comparable to the U.S. [PLOS One/Oregon Capital Chronicle]
The day after the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, around 80 families showed up to the county office for free counseling services. They were among many locals seeking mental health care — and the needs are still great. Providers worry that in the months and years to come, the community will struggle to find treatment for long-term mental health needs related to the attack. [KFF Health News]
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection report on the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, recommended that the Border Patrol change its policies around active shootings, finding that agents who responded to the massacre acted within agency rules. The review suggested providing CBP agents with updated active-shooter response training and best practices, and allowing agents to respond to mass shootings in non-federal cases. Hundreds of law enforcement officers waited over an hour to confront the Uvalde shooter, opting instead for Border Patrol agents to arrive. [The Texas Tribune]
A new Gallup analysis shows that young women identify as liberal in much higher proportions than they did around a decade ago, substantially widening a gender gap on political issues with young men. One of the key policy issues relevant to the shift? Gun laws. [Gallup]
Washington, D.C., police released body camera footage from the officers who shot and killed Justin Robinson, a violence interrupter with the city’s Cure the Streets program, in his car on September 1. The video sparked street protests last week. Policing experts who reviewed the footage said that officers could have tried other things before approaching the vehicle: “From a tactical perspective,” said one criminologist, “it’s really poor from start to finish in my view.” [The Washington Post]
This section was written by Sunny Sone.
Data Point
74 percent — the proportion of women ages 18 to 29 who said gun laws spanning 2017 to 2024 should be stricter. That’s up from 58 percent from the period spanning 2008 to 2016. [Gallup]
Non Sequitur
An off-topic story for a change of pace.
The Scrappy Store That Gave Me Everything When I Had Nothing: An ode to an old friend, the 99 Cents Store. [High Country News]
