Gunman shoots top US politician after ranting: Time to destroy Trump
A SENIOR Republican was among five shot yesterday after a Trump- hating gunman opened fire on a congressional baseball practice.
Steve Scalise – the third most senior Republican in the House of Representatives – was shot in the hip. Two of his bodyguards, an aide and a lobbyist, were also hit in the ambush in a Washington suburb.
Gunman James Hodgkinson, 66, had earlier announced ‘It’s time to destroy Trump and Co’ on social media.
Hodgkinson, who worked on the election campaign of Democrat Bernie Sanders last year, was wounded by police during a five-minute gun battle and later died of his injuries.
Mr Sanders later tweeted: ‘I am sickened by this despicable act.’
Witnesses said the gunman, armed with an assault rifle, walked up to the chain-link fence near the third-base dugout and started firing. Congressman Jeff Duncan said Hodgkinson had asked him whether Republicans or Democrats were practising.
Mr Scalise, 51, standing at second base, was hit and fell to the ground. He crawled away from the gunman, leaving a trail of blood as his bodyguards from Washington’s Capitol Police returned fire. Other congressmen dashed to find cover in the exposed baseball field.
The politicians were preparing for a charity game against the Democrats tomorrow. Kentucky senator Rand Paul said: ‘Without the Capitol Hill police it would have been a massacre. We had no defence at all. The field was basically a killing field.’
Congressman Mike Bishop, who was on the pitch, added: ‘He was hunting us at that point. There was so much gunfire, you couldn’t get up and run. Pop, pop, pop, pop – it’s a sound I’ll never forget.’
If Mr Scalise’s bodyguards hadn’t been there to fire back, ‘he would have come up to each one of us and shot us point- blank’, Mr Bishop added.
Republican representative Mo Brooks said he used his belt as a tourniquet on Mr Scalise’s injury. ‘My adrenalin is raging,’ he said shortly afterwards. ‘It’s not easy to take when you see people around you being shot and you don’t have a weapon yourself.’ Mr Scalise, a staunch conservative, underwent surgery and was in a stable condition, but two others were critically injured.
President Donald Trump called for national unity after what he described as a ‘very, very, very brutal assault’.
He said: ‘We do well in times like these to remember that everyone who serves in our nation’s capital is here because, above all, they love our country.’
Hodgkinson ran a home inspection business and was married with at least one child. He drew complaints to police from neighbours in March for practising with a rifle too close to their homes in Belleville, Illinois.
He may have been targeting the politicians for weeks as it emerged he had spent the past month at a YMCA gym opposite the baseball field, spending his days using his laptop computer in the foyer.
His Facebook page was full of anti-Trump posts, including one from March which said: ‘Trump is Traitor. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.’