Utah governor says political violence is on the rise. Is the United States ‘broken’?

The shooting death of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University was a “political assassination,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said.

“Our nation is broken,” the governor said Wednesday, before listing out politically motivated violent incidents that have happened in our country over the last year and change: Two state legislators were fatally shot in Minnesota, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house was set ablaze with two Molotov cocktails, and, of course, U.S. President Donald Trump was shot during a campaign event last September.

In the wake of Kirk’s slaying, it certainly feels like Cox is right about our country. But to what extent?

I was also extremely curious as to Utah’s role in the nation’s political violence scales. Growing up here, I felt like Utah was a haven compared to the wider nation, a sentiment many of those at UVU shared Wednesday. Does that still hold up?

To find out, we’ll need an excellent data set. Luckily, we have one.

Political violence, demonstrations on the rise

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data organization (usually known as ACLED) is a non-governmental and impartial record-keeper for political violence worldwide. Its database is huge, listing 401,000 events of violence in the last year that have led to approximately 250,000 fatalities.

Most of those aren’t happening in the United States, of course: Ukraine, India, Russia, Palestine, and Mexico are at the top of the list, with tens of thousands of fatalities each. In contrast, the U.S. has only seen 50 deaths in the past year due to political violence.

ACLED also tracks political protests (both peaceful and violent), demonstrations, and riots, both large and small, including those in the U.S. That gives the organization the ability to track trends in these categories.

Protests aren’t inherently violent or even bad, of course, but they do tend to correlate with a certain amount of political unhappiness. They reflect the desire of people to get out of their homes and do something about a political issue. That passion does, sometimes but rarely, lead to violence.

So what are they seeing in 2025?

• In the world, political violence is falling slightly; however, the number of people affected by that violence has increased.

• The number of politically motivated deaths is up from the last two years. As mentioned earlier, 2025 has seen 50 such fatalities. That means we’ve already exceeded the number of politically motivated deaths that occurred in the U.S. in 2024 — 33. However, there were more deaths in 2020 (74 deaths), 2021 (87), and 2022 (98).

• In the U.S., the number of protests has risen to rates approximating what we saw in 2020. In 2020, there were approximately 59 protests per day. So far in 2025, there have been approximately 54 protests per day. That’s a sharp rise from 2024, when we saw 29 protests per day.

• Interestingly, those protests and demonstrations have spread out when compared to 2020, when they mostly took place in urban centers. Now, there are protests in all sorts of counties across the nation, including rural and suburban areas. The number of counties in which protests and the like have taken place has more than doubled.

• However, riots in the U.S. — defined as when three or more demonstrators engage in violent or destructive acts — are much lower than they were in the 2020 peak. We’ve seen 11 riots per month on average so far in 2025 in the U.S.

The largest politically-motivated act of violence that has occurred in the U.S. this year was the New Orleans massacre, in which a man who said he was supporting the Islamic State killed 14 revelers in the early hours of Jan. 1.

What about Utah?

Two of those 50 deaths this year, though, have happened in Utah. First came the death of Arthur “Afa” Folasa Ah Loo, a fashion designer shot by a member of a “peacekeeping team” in the No Kings protest in Salt Lake City’s downtown.

Then, of course, came Charlie Kirk’s death.

Law enforcement officials have arrested a 22-year-old Utah man in connection with the shooting. Cox said the man “had become more political in recent years.”

So Kirk’s death would put Utah tied for sixth among U.S. states in terms of fatalities to political violence in 2025 — behind Louisiana, New York, Georgia, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

From 2020 through 2024, there were no deaths as a result of political violence in Utah tracked by ACLED.

Really, this is among the largest sources of our concern here in Utah: These violent incidents resulting in death simply haven’t happened here recently until now.

What about the number of protests? Following the trend nationally, Utah has seen more protests this year than in any year since 2020.

But overall, Utah still ranks as one of the states with the lowest number of protests per capita. We rank 42nd so far this year.

That’s after ranking 36th a year ago, 42nd again in 2023, 46th in 2022, 43rd in 2021, and 33rd in 2020 when it comes to protests per capita among U.S. states.

In other words, it seems like Utah’s increased interest in protest is a reflection of national trends, and probably not local ones. With regard to deaths, the small sample size makes it difficult to extrapolate trends at all.

How worried should we be?

So what’s going on?

“The incidences of targeted attacks on political figures are a not uncommon occurrence,” Bianca Ho, a North America researcher at ACLED, told The Salt Lake Tribune about the political violence occurring in the United States. “What is interesting is that these incidences are not carried out by organized extremist groups who are more active in propaganda, recruitment, and training in organized violence, but rather lone wolves.”

Police and the FBI are still searching for answers related to Kirk’s slaying.

But attacks Cox mentioned — the Minnesota legislators, the Pennsylvania governor, and President Trump — appear at this time to be done by lone wolves.

In fact, the death of Ah Loo in Utah is a rare instance of a member of a political group, in this case the 50501 group, being involved in a fatality.

This lone wolf source of violence is in contrast to many of the other countries ACLED studies, which tend to see those fatalities from state actors, or non-state armed groups and militias. Those are the kinds of groups that generally create the environment needed for widespread violence in the streets and the huge amounts of political killing seen in some other regions.

In the U.S., extremist and armed groups like the Patriot Front “are increasingly engaged in propaganda, training, and recruitment activities,” ACLED said, but have not really escalated into violence in 2025.

“What this tells us is that America is not on the brink of civil war,” Ho said.

That’s good to hear.

But that’s not to say there isn’t a significant problem. The current risk instead “lies in individuals who carry out lone attacks with unclear or fringe ideologies,” Ho continued. “These actors may not control territory or command armies, but they can still disrupt communities, intimidate opponents, and create a climate of fear.”

We certainly saw that on Wednesday across Utah.

One path to enhance the likelihood of normalcy, then, might be to emphasize the opposite. To go about life without disruption. To, instead, respect political opponents.

And, hopefully, to minimize fear to the extent possible.

A lot has happened in Utah this year, but the data and analysis show that it doesn’t mean we’re doomed to a fate of widespread political violence.