Gen Z and the Gospel of the Gun: Inside America’s Growing Assassination Culture

 

The shooters are getting younger, the rhetoric is getting hotter, and political violence is no longer a nightmare—it’s a pattern. When grievance meets ideology and calls itself justice, bullets follow—and America is inching toward normalizing assassination.

At 1.30am, a 21-year-old illustrator named Austin Tucker Martin drove through the gates of Mar-a-Lago like a man chasing a ghost. He had a shotgun. He had a fuel can. He did not have a plan that made sense. President Trump was 1,000 miles away in Washington, hosting the National Governors Association dinner at the White House. The target wasn’t even home. That detail alone tells me something. This wasn’t a professional hit. This was theater. Dark, delusional theater.

Law enforcement says Martin entered the compound as another car exited. Once inside, he placed the fuel can on the ground and appeared to aim his shotgun at it. When Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach sheriff’s deputy ordered him to drop the weapon, he refused. They fired. He died there, in the humid Florida dark, before dawn broke over the Atlantic.

I’m going to say this, even as motive remains officially unknown: this smells like the growing assassination culture among parts of Gen Z. And what do I mean by that? I mean you take a grievance, you bolt it to an intractable ideology, and then you polish it with moral absolutism until it gleams like righteousness. Suddenly violence feels holy. Suddenly killing feels like cleansing.

We have to be careful. I know the buzzwords. Recency bias. Availability heuristic. We just saw something like this, so we assume this is that. Fine. I get it. I’m not saying every young man with a social media account is a ticking bomb. I’m saying the pattern is getting harder to ignore. Martin was 21. Thomas Crooks, who tried to assassinate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania during the 2024 campaign, was 20. Crooks was killed by Secret Service agents after firing shots that wounded Trump. Two young men. Two attempts. Both dead before their stories could be fully told.

Zoom out. In nearly 250 years of American history, 4 presidents have been assassinated while in office: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963. The country has had 47 presidents. Assassinations are rare. Attempts are also rare when you stretch them across centuries.

But what happens when 3 attempts or plots cluster around a single presidency and campaign cycle? Butler. The golf club in West Palm Beach. Now Mar-a-Lago. Whether Trump was present or not, the symbolism is obvious. The threat matrix is not theoretical anymore. It is active.

And here’s what gnaws at me: the age curve. According to FBI data and research compiled by the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, most lone-actor attackers in targeted violence cases are male, often under 35. In school shooting data analyzed by the K-12 School Shooting Database, many perpetrators fall between 14 and 18. In broader mass shooting analyses by the Violence Project, the average age is around 33, but there has been a visible stream of younger offenders in high-profile cases over the past decade.

I’m not playing statistician games. I’m telling you what the trend feels like on the street. The shooters are getting younger. The fuse is getting shorter.

Martin lived more than 10 hours away in North Carolina, in a quiet region known more for golf courses than gunfire. His website showcased pen drawings of local courses like Pine Needles and Mid Pines. That detail matters. He wasn’t some cartel assassin. He was an artist. His sister died in a car crash at age 21 in 2023. That kind of loss can hollow a person out. Grief, untreated and stewing, becomes gasoline. But grief alone doesn’t drive someone through security gates with a shotgun and a fuel can. Something else has to enter the bloodstream. Rage. Ideology. A sense that the world is corrupt and only you see the truth. That’s the patina of moral absolutism. It tells a young man, “You are not a criminal. You are a crusader.” It tells him that laws are chains and violence is liberation. It tells him that history will vindicate him.

History rarely does.

Let’s not pretend this is a one-party problem. Political violence has splashed across the spectrum. Charlie Kirk, a right-wing polemicist, was killed while debating students in Utah. Melissa Hortman, a senior Democrat, was assassinated in her home. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot and seriously injured. Josh Shapiro survived an arson attack on the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg. The fever is bipartisan.

But the age profile keeps poking through. A man in his 20s. A kid barely old enough to rent a car. Raised on algorithmic outrage. Marinated in social media feeds that reward extremity and punish nuance.

When Scott Bessent said the “venom” has been normalized, he was making a political point. Fine. Politicians always do. But strip away the spin and one thing remains true: the rhetoric has become radioactive. Words like “existential threat” are thrown around like confetti. If you tell a generation that the other side is not just wrong but evil, not just mistaken but monstrous, some unstable mind will eventually decide monsters must be destroyed. And here’s the irony. The same generation that talks endlessly about mental health is drowning in untreated despair. CDC data shows that suicide rates among people aged 10 to 14 increased by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2018. Among young adults aged 20 to 24, rates have also climbed in recent years. That doesn’t make someone violent. But it tells me something is cracking beneath the surface.

An assassination culture doesn’t begin with a gun. It begins with a story. A story that says you are the hero, the system is rotten, and violence is the shortcut to meaning. For a lonely 21-year-old at 1.30am, that story can feel intoxicating.

We still don’t know Martin’s motive. We don’t know what was in his head as he aimed that shotgun near a fuel can. Was it a suicide-by-cop scenario? A delusional plot? A symbolic act? The FBI will dig. They will analyze devices, messages, browsing history. They will map contacts. That’s their job.

My job, as I see it, is to call a spade a spade. The clustering of young male attackers around high-profile political targets is not random noise. It reflects a cultural shift. The internet has flattened the distance between grievance and action. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald needed a rifle and a plan. In 2026, a disaffected 21-year-old needs a grievance, a smartphone, and a weekend.

We like to think of assassination as a relic of the 19th century. A pistol in a theater. A revolver at a train station. But the tools change. The psychology remains. Take a grievance. Add ideology. Coat it in moral purity. Pull the trigger.

I don’t say this to demonize an entire generation. Most Gen Z kids are hustling, studying, working, caring for siblings, building startups, drawing golf courses. But a small slice is drifting toward something darker. And when that slice picks up a gun, the consequences echo. We can dismiss this as isolated madness. We can blame only one party. We can pretend the threat matrix isn’t escalating. Or we can admit that something in our culture is feeding young men a steady diet of rage and purpose wrapped in violence.

Four presidents have been assassinated in nearly 250 years. That rarity is part of what makes America resilient. But when attempted attacks cluster, when the suspects are barely out of adolescence, when the ideology feels like gasoline waiting for a spark, I pay attention.

Because once assassination becomes a language of politics, even at the margins, it doesn’t stay at the margins for long. And when the young start speaking that language, the future gets very loud, very fast.

 

On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my  “Brief Book Series” worth exploring. You can also read them here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.