For years, too many years, we would hear about the urgent need to take the gun out of Irish life, political and beyond political.
The Good Friday Agreement and the decommissioning that followed largely succeeded in doing this. Political life in Ireland today is centered on words that are good, bad and indifferent. In other words, relatively normal politics.
Could the same be said for the United States of America? Well, perhaps the comparison between Ireland and the United States is something of a stretch. The sheer difference in scale, geographic, demographic, economic, social and political, presents challenges.
But both countries share a common core of values: a belief in freedom of expression and democratic choice.
That said, the challenges facing political life in Ireland and the U.S. would appear to be lately diverging. And they are diverging most markedly in the matter of the gun.
Now we have spoken on this page in the past about guns in America. American gun culture is unique in the developed world and there is little or no sign that it will even be moderated, never mind going into retreat.
Taking the gun out of American societal life is simply not going to happen in the foreseeable future. But that does not mean we can't try our very best to remove it from political life.
The spate of gun violence in the nation's political life can be bracketed in months, years, decades, centuries. Take your pick.
But the recent iteration can begin with the pre-election attempted assassination of President Trump and the assassination just days ago of political activist Charlie Kirk.
What has followed these and other appalling violent incidents has not been encouraging. Many have called for calm, for an end to violence and a restoration of something approaching political civility. But not enough have called for this. And so, there is rising tension in the American political air as the year enters its last few months.
Much of the tension can be traced to heated rhetoric that points to one side or another being "radical." What lately passes for radical is, in large part, only in the eyes of the beholder. In overall terms there is little that is radical about American politics in general. But behavior and ideology are not the same thing.
What is lately radical is the inability of legislators to work together in common cause to improve the lives of Americans. What is radical is the all too often hateful rhetoric, the characterization of political opponents as abstract and not as fellow Americans who might simply have other ideas as to how society should move forward.
What is radical today is the state of American governance and government. Far from being a shining example for other nations to follow, is the very opposite.
So how does America deal with these troubles? The cause of peace in Ireland was in large part aided to the point of success by the intervention of others, most notably the United States. The idea of an outside intervention in U.S. domestic politics is too fantastic a notion to consider. We need to make things better ourselves. No easy task, and one that will likely take some time.
Now we would be remiss in pointing to just the United States as a country where "normal" politics is facing challenges. There are all too many countries around the world where political discourse faces anger, division, the threat of violence. Ireland, of late, is one of them.
There's this from the Irish Times: "Violent threats against Tánaiste Simon Harris and his family are being treated as a 'national security' issue by gardaí, who are employing anti-terrorism legislation to catch the perpetrators.
"Gardaí now believe at least one of the threats came from overseas and have asked Interpol for assistance in co-ordinating with other police forces.
"This came after officers from the Special Detective Unit, which is leading the investigation, obtained IP addresses and other identifying data relating to the accounts where the threats originated. The data was provided by social media platforms on request from the Garda.
"Details of additional threats, which were made as part of an apparently co-ordinated campaign, have also emerged. A week ago, it was reported calls were made to three Garda stations alleging there was a bomb in Mr Harris’s home in Greystones, Co Wicklow, which he shares with his wife and two young children."
The internet is a wonderful thing. It has changed our world. But it also facilitates those who would impose a dark vision upon our world. There are no longer national boundaries in the way they once existed. We all of us share a collective global fate. And it will be determined by the nature and practice of our politics.
