The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has inserted an irrevocable act of violence into this year’s presidential election. We have only begun to see how it is resonating and may finally play out.

Even before the attempt on his life, Trump had used incendiary language on the topic of political violence, with a pattern of suggesting that his supporters may resort to force. When asked about the possibility of violence around the November election, he said that he doesn’t believe it will happen because he will win but that it “always depends on the fairness of an election.” During his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas, he spoke at length about his victimization by political enemies and of “retribution” while telling supporters, “I am your warrior, I am your justice.” The use of such rhetoric by any major presidential candidate is unprecedented, and his innuendos leave open the idea of resort to violence. Given this record, the assassination attempt could make either disruption around the election or extrajudicial revenge against opponents more likely.

The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, like so many before him, chose a weapon from America’s favorite family of rifles. Firing a small bullet traveling nearly three times the speed of sound, the AR-15 rifle originated as a lightweight, semiautomatic version of the military, Vietnam War-era M-16 rifle. The same small fast rounds fired by AR-15s often cause severe tissue damage and bleeding. Smaller bodies like those of children can bleed out faster.

Some gun reform advocates noted the irony of Trump’s failed assassin using an AR-15, given that Trump and the GOP had ensured that consumer sales of this and other firearms would continue to be restricted by only a few federal regulations. Many Republican lawmakers and others like Donald Trump Jr. have been pictured, often with their families, with AR-15 rifles, and many GOP lawmakers wear a pin on their lapel of a tiny black AR-15.

The attempt on Trump’s life could yet spike a fever on the armed right for a path of revenge, in line with Trump’s violent rhetoric. A struggle for power if he is pronounced the loser on Nov. 5 would be brutal and unpredictable. Extrajudicial detentions and attacks on his perceived enemies if he wins would take us to the razor’s edge of democracy as we know it.

The ideology of gun rights revolves around a single belief: that regulating guns is a slippery slope to tyranny and subjugation, if not genocide, and that any new regulations — from more thorough background checks to tougher laws to stop the trafficking of guns — must be stopped, if not rolled back, lest our freedoms be taken away. For decades, this thinking has fueled anti-government grievances, and its adherents have promoted carrying arms as a legitimate form of protest.

The gun rights movement has hardened on Trump’s watch, and he has benefited from that hardening, despite his own public vacillations over gun regulations as late as 2019. Groups from neo-Nazis to the National Rifle Association (NRA) have radicalized gun owners by spreading myths that demonize gun control. Not unlike the way authoritarians across the world have rewritten history to advance their agenda, pro-gun ideologues and leaders in the U.S. have invented their own gospel of gun rights.

This ideology, more than any amount of NRA or gun industry money, is what has long blocked gun reform. Since Trump’s rise, however, it has also helped fuel the violence threatening the rule of law. Besides this ideology, gun rights advocates and Trump and his allies are bound together by their shared grievances against perceived government overreach, along with their narratives of victimhood and a tendency to blame anything and everything on their opponents, irrespective of facts. For example, gun advocates often blame a city or state’s restrictions on gun purchases for the spread of illegal guns, without mentioning that many if not most of them were trafficked in from other states with looser gun laws.

It wasn’t always like this. Back in 1959, three-quarters of Americans told the polling group later known as Gallup that they favored requiring a police permit before anyone could buy a gun. The Supreme Court recently overturned a New York law that for a century had required a police permit to buy a gun. No fewer than 29 states today allow for the carrying of concealed weapons without a permit.

To drive home their message of absolute and “unyielding” gun rights, pro-gun ideologues and advocates have rewritten the history of different eras with a new pro-gun twist.

One old myth glorifies words that a Spartan king reportedly sent to the Persians on the eve of battle when asked to surrender his weapons — “Molon labe” (“Come and take them”). Historians consider this phrase apocryphal. Yet countless firearms vendors have appropriated it to boost sales. The phrase is embossed into leather by Alien Gear Holsters. It is engraved into the aluminum replacement receivers of select AR-15 rifles. For elite buyers, Sig Sauer USA offers “Molon labe” inlaid in 24-carat gold in its Spartan pistols. Slide back plates for select Glock pistols come with it engraved in brass or stainless steel. Other merchandise sporting the phrase runs from T-shirts to hats, water bottles to bottle openers.

Another more recent myth claims that only 3% of the colonial population joined militias or fought in the Revolutionary War, when many historians suggest that close to 15% of the population took up arms against the British crown. So-called “Three Percenters” downplay this number as if to say that like them, we are a small group or vanguard, yet we are still big enough to lead the fight for freedom. More skittish than other paramilitary groups, Three Percenters have long claimed not to be a militia, out of fear of being labeled as terrorists, while they split over whether to join in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol takeover.

One claim is that the NRA was founded to support the Second Amendment and help arm freed slaves against the Ku Klux Klan. This is pure fiction. The NRA was founded after the Civil War to improve military riflery in anticipation of future wars and was modeled from its name down to its 400-pound iron targets on the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom. The modern NRA has spent so much energy in recent years promoting its new origin story that few people inside or outside the organization now know much about how it began. The American NRA copied its name from the British NRA and then beat their own former role models on their home range in Queens County on Long Island to become the international rifle champions of the world.

Another fabrication claims that the Holocaust was enabled by gun control and that the Nazis used old registries of gun owners from the previous regime, the democratic Weimar Republic, to target Jews and seize their weapons. Scholars have long debunked this idea. Yet this lie, more than any other, has long blocked gun reform and legitimized the option of using force of arms. In 2015, then-presidential candidate Ben Carson repeated this claim on CNN. Alan E. Steinweis, distinguished professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont and the author of “The People’s Dictatorship: A History of Nazi Germany” (2023), took to the pages of The New York Times to debunk it. Yet countless Americans still believe that gun control enabled the Holocaust, among other 20th-century atrocities.

Then there is another fictional claim, boosted by the lie about the NRA helping to arm freed slaves, that gun control is inherently racist and disempowering to African Americans and other minorities. This claim whitewashes America’s long history of wielding guns against Blacks, both during slavery and since, as the historian Carol Anderson shows in her book “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America” (2021). No one is known to have helped arm recently freed slaves at the time at all.

As a package, these fairy tales suggest that gun control itself is part of a totalitarian plot to disarm citizens and then repress them, as has allegedly happened many times before in history. Nazi Germany, Cuba and Rwanda are among those nations often cited as examples. In not one of these cases, however, is the claim true.

Tens of millions of gun owners in the U.S. believe this ideology as if it were gospel. The Republican Party, from the rank and file to most of its leaders, is deeply wedded to this faith, which became part of the foundation on which Trump built his narrative of grievances. And his ascendancy, in turn, has given this same set of gun rights beliefs their own viral boost.

Trump’s 2016 campaign database listed Matthew Crooks’ father — who purchased the AR-15 his son used in his attempt on Trump’s life and kept it in their home — as likely being receptive to pro-gun messaging as “a strong Republican, likely gun owner and ‘hunter.’” He would likely also be receptive to lies about gun rights.

It wasn’t until the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland that a representative of the NRA (or any pro-gun group) was given the stage at the national convention of either major political party. Yet today an extremist interpretation of gun rights is infused into the worldview and culture of the GOP.

Since Trump’s election in 2016, pro-gun advocacy has gone beyond merely blocking gun reform legislation to normalizing the use of force to achieve political ends. Indeed, these views helped justify incitement of violence via cellphone apps and social media during the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and have led private paramilitary groups to expand, arm and train with live fire in anticipation of civil unrest, if not combat — like in suburban Nassau County on Long Island, where a Trump ally is training 75 people to be “special deputies.” This ideology has been invoked to advocate vigilante violence by extremist groups, including the Boogaloo Bois against Black Lives Matter protesters on platforms like Instagram — which led Meta to take down more than 300 accounts.

It is this same ideology that made the attempt on Trump’s life more likely.

Even if Trump were to take a more conciliatory tone, as he has hinted, the desire for revenge among his hardcore supporters will persist. And so will their belief in the ongoing mythology woven by gun proponents.

The pro-gun myth with the oldest roots looks back to the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The Spartan King Leonidas I and all 300 of his men were killed within three days by invading Persian forces. But on the eve of combat, or so the tale is told, the Persian king, Xerxes, demanded that Leonidas order his men to lay down their arms and surrender. This led Leonidas to reply with defiance using the apocryphal phrase that grew so popular in the United States during the rise of militias in the 1990s — “Molon labe.”

The only record attributing the phrase to Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae was written five centuries later, however, in the first century CE, by the Greek philosopher Plutarch. According to the classicist Myke Cole, “Plutarch was a moral essayist, not a historian.” No corresponding source for either this missive or the use of the phrase has ever been discovered. Cole added, “The phrase is almost certainly apocryphal.”

But the likelihood that this use of “Molon labe” was made up has hardly curbed its appeal, as it seems to resonate with the spirit of modern gun rights resistance. GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have worn gear referencing the phrase, as have armed paramilitaries from Proud Boys to Three Percenters, as well as neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate and other white power groups.

The NRA, however, never adopted the phrase. This may explain why more radical groups are appropriating it. The Firearms Policy Coalition was only established in 2013, in the wake of the December 2012 mass murder of 20 6-to-7-year-olds and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, when new gun legislation was briefly under consideration. The upstart group rejected the NRA’s practice of honoring law enforcement and called instead for “maximal liberty” to “end government coercion.” The Supreme Court cited this group throughout its June 2024 decision, written by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, overturning a law signed by President Trump, in one of his two vacillations on gun rights while in office, and ruling a rapid-fire accessory called a bump stock constitutional.

Three Percenter groups see themselves as a modern armed vanguard who “will not disarm” and have based their name on another lie about gun rights.

The modern emblem of Three Percenters is the Roman numeral III inside the 13 white stars of a Revolutionary War-era American flag. Three Percenters have long been ambivalent about insurrection. Their founding organization has noted how militias were scrutinized as possible terrorist groups after the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 and injured more than 600. So Three Percenters have long denied, unconvincingly, that they are militias.

Moreover, to avoid being identified in the eyes of law enforcement, many Three Percenters have flown the Gadsden flag, a yellow banner with a green coiled timber rattlesnake on grass over the words, “Don’t tread on me.” The flag was designed by Christopher Gadsden, a brigadier general from South Carolina in the Continental Army. Different Three Percenters groups were also divided over whether to participate in the Jan. 6 Capitol takeover.

The historical claim behind their name, as was previously posted by Three Percenter groups, is that only 80,000 people — or less than 3% of a population of 2.78 million — joined either the Continental Army or a militia during the Revolutionary War, with the rest of the population deemed indifferent or treacherous. But nonpartisan sources like the American Battlefield Trust report there were 231,000 soldiers in the Continental Army, never more than 48,000 deployed at a time, along with 145,000 militiamen. That suggests 376,000 total combatants out of a population of 2.5 million — excluding a half million slaves — or just over 15%.

This distortion of numbers to bolster credentials as guardians of freedom is one thing; making history up from scratch is another.

As for the Ku Klux Klan myth, the NRA rolled out this fabrication in stages, starting under President Barack Obama and finishing under President Trump.

The NRA introduced the first stage of this lie after a Florida neighborhood watch coordinator, George Zimmerman, shot dead an unarmed 17-year-old African American, Trayvon Martin, who was walking down the street and eating Skittles. Zimmerman was acquitted in a case that helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, which strove to bring attention to police and vigilante shootings of African Americans. The same lie was told after the Sandy Hook massacre. Eight months later, as if he were starting a lie to compete with the ongoing public outrage over how to respond to a senseless school shooting, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre claimed that the NRA was the oldest civil rights group.

This slogan quickly became the group’s new tagline on its website and was used in statements by NRA deputies and lawyers. A few years later, after Trump praised neo-Nazis and others who attended the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally as “very fine people,” and with police shootings of African Americans continuing to roil the country, the NRA rolled out the rest of its fabulist history.

“I’m a Black American and I know that the NRA was started as a civil rights organization training Black Americans to arm themselves and defend themselves against the KKK,” said Candace Owens on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” in 2018, announcing that she had just joined the NRA.

Six months later, Allen West, an NRA board member, wrote in his column at Christian News Service, “As an American black man, the history of the National Rifle Association has a special meaning for me, and I often reflect upon it,” going on to make the same claim.

A year later, while speaking at the NRA annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, while LaPierre sat on the dais, West proclaimed before nearly 1,000 NRA members and officials: “Know the history. The NRA, this organization, stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights.” His remarks drew the gathering’s strongest applause before the meeting grew tense when members began to demand financial accountability (an embezzlement scandal had broken the night before that split NRA leaders like LaPierre and West).

Yet this lie is contradicted by the NRA’s own records. The NRA was founded in 1871 in New York City by two former Union officers, one of whom had been a New York Times correspondent during the Civil War. Their goal was to improve marksmanship among soldiers and able-bodied men, and they were inspired by the exemplary standard of Royal English riflery. When these former Union officers founded the NRA, they took their name, range design and iron targets straight from the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom — over a decade after Queen Victoria herself fired its inaugural shot in London at Wimbledon Common. But having British Royal roots is inconvenient for a group that insists on tracing its origin to the Second Amendment.

The canard most invoked by gun rights advocates, however, rewrites the Holocaust to claim that it was enabled by gun control — specifically, that the Nazis used registration lists of gun owners that were part of a gun control plan under the Weimar Republic to raid Jews in their homes and seize their guns.

The research for this rewriting of the Holocaust was funded by NRA nonprofit foundations during Obama’s first term as president. The scholar involved was Stephen P. Halbrook. America’s top pro-gun lawyer, he filed an amicus brief on behalf of most members of both houses of Congress to the Supreme Court in the benchmark Heller decision that established, in 2008, an individual right to keep arms. Halbrook later wrote the book “Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State.’”

A small California think tank, the Independent Institute, published it in 2013. “For whatever reason, historians have paid no attention to Nazi laws and policies restricting firearms ownership as essential elements in creating tyranny,” Halbrook wrote in the introduction.

Evidence suggests, however, that the Nazis raided Jewish homes by going door to door and confiscated, in fact, few usable weapons and plenty of valuables. Halbrook, for instance, writes that in Leipzig in November 1938, “three Jews surrendered their slashing and thrusting weapons and one Jew surrendered his hunting rifles. Two bayonets and a 85 mm grenade were reported found and surrendered.”

Although you’d never know it by reading an excerpt of his book in American Rifleman, the flagship magazine of the NRA, Halbrook buried in the book’s back pages how he never found the evidence to prove his case.

“Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate. Many such records may have been destroyed during the war, either by the Nazis themselves or due to Allied bombings,” he wrote on page 181. Yet documents from other aspects of the Holocaust survived the war.

A body of work following that of the renowned late Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg has long since established that the Jews in Europe as a group were not armed and had no tradition of either gun ownership or resistance.

Yet the fear that almost any gun control still poses a danger to liberty resonates with countless Americans. The fear of gun registration was invoked early in President Joe Biden’s term by both Cruz and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. They used it to kill reform amendments from improving background checks to tracking ghost guns. On Fox News, Hawley said background checks were Biden’s backdoor to gun registration without being asked to explain how or why. It’s as if much of Fox’s audience already knew the myth about the dangers of gun registration.

Take Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and executed for the Oklahoma City bombing. An advocate for both gun rights and neo-Nazism, he said his favorite film was “Red Dawn.” Released in 1984, it starred Patrick Swayze. In it, Cuban and Soviet officers invade Colorado and discover gun registries, and then use them to execute gun owners in their homes. Two years later, President Ronald Reagan signed the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act. Drafted by the NRA’s LaPierre, the law prohibits federal agencies from establishing “any system of registration” of gun owners.

One of the most cherished myths about gun rights, in other words, is based on fiction, and it has consequences. Today no more than seven states and the District of Columbia keep registries of certain types of firearms. Ten more states keep registries of permits required to carry concealed guns in those states. Most states, reflecting the power of the creed, keep no gun registries at all.

Gun rights advocates also point to the Soviet Union and Cuba as examples of gun control leading to the gulag. However, Russia before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution never had gun control, other than a few regulations prohibiting hunting or shooting around parks or churches. The communist government decreed in 1918 that citizens turn in their weapons or face 10 years imprisonment. Prior gun control had nothing to do with it.

In Cuba, the communist government led by Fidel Castro at first encouraged people to be armed. But five years later, over state radio, the government in Havana ordered Cubans to turn in their guns. “‘All citizens must turn in their combat weapons,’” Time magazine quoted broadcasts saying in September 1965. “‘Civilians must take arms to police stations, soldiers to military headquarters.’”

In other states that became communist, like both China and Cambodia before each of their respective Maoist revolutions, the overwhelming majority of people among their largely peasant populations were too poor to afford guns. So were nearly all people across Rwanda when its genocide occurred decades later, the killers wielding more machetes than rifles.

The theory of gun control as a slippery slope is a hypothesis framed falsely as fact. The idea is that if enough people had been armed before any authoritarian takeover, they would have had a chance to fight back. But prior gun control like old registries of gun owners has never led to disarmament. Even in democratic nations like the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, each of which has confiscated semiautomatic firearms, every government used a buyback campaign, combined with a law imposing either a fine or imprisonment for not relinquishing them, to remove the guns from circulation.

The movement for gun rights was already strong before it mushroomed under Trump’s watch. For decades, the myths of gun rights have shaped the way countless Americans see almost any regulation of firearms. Washington has not passed any major, lasting gun reform in over half a century — since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson — while NRA and gun industry lobbying based on these myths have vastly expanded gun rights, including the right to both open-carry and concealed-carry guns in most states without registration.

These lies have influenced both Americans and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Now the test of whether a gun law is constitutional considers no modern evidence at all, such as the lethality of military-lineage semiautomatics or the toll of gun violence on our children. As the highest court in the land increasingly pivots toward originalism, it adjudicates on whether a law is “analogous” to a law or tradition dating to when the Bill of Rights was ratified in the late 18th century or as far back as legislation in England, where our shared Anglo-American common law began, during the reign of King Henry VIII.

But today the movement for gun reform is also stronger. Different generations of survivors have mobilized in the wake of relentless gun tragedies, like the Sandy Hook horror and the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, not to mention countless others across the nation. With their support, Biden signed the nation’s first major gun law in nearly 30 years. But the law’s handful of measures, while not insignificant, together add up only to baby steps unlikely to measurably curb our gun violence.

Advocates for gun reform have long blamed the gun lobby and its longtime flagship, the NRA, for blocking new gun legislation. But LaPierre has been disgraced by an embezzlement scandal, and the NRA itself may yet end up looking like roadkill in the rearview mirror.

By now, what’s blocking gun reform is less the gun lobby than the ideology of gun rights it helped invent. History is rich with advocates who only learned the hard way that it is easier to defeat a group than an idea. That this belief is shared by so many modern conservatives today is why meaningful gun reform is blocked, and has been for more than a generation.

These lies about gun rights spread at the expense of our — and our kids’ — safety and health. This creed is why we continue to suffer, on the scale of a low-intensity war, exponentially more gun violence than every other developed nation, and why only in our nation is gun violence the leading cause of death of children from toddlers to late teens — a calamity we seem to be exporting across the border. In Mexico, where gun violence and the drug trade is endemic, more than two-thirds of guns seized at crime scenes were first sold in retail shops in the United States.

The Heritage Foundation, lately in the news over its Project 2025 to establish a more authoritarian right-wing nation, says on its website that an armed citizenry is a “major check” on keeping tyranny at bay, but only if citizens can go on buying guns and ammunition without leaving a paper trail will this armed citizenry be guaranteed. This belief suits the gun industry from conglomerates such as Ruger to small vendors in what has long been the world’s largest civilian firearms market, worth $90 billion a year. It fits with the newer prospect, too, of an unaccountable president backed by a mix of armed citizens and official forces.

“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” Trump said when he caved and flip-flopped himself on background checks in 2019, and when he also became the first U.S. president to recite the creed’s core belief. That creed draws significant strength from lies about the past and has gone beyond blocking gun reform, shading into the incitement of violence and what may yet emerge as Trump’s revenge.