North Carolina’s 14th district was created as a new seat after the 2020 census. The race in the 14th is between Democrat Jeff Jackson and Republican Pat Harrigan both of whom are veterans. Last week, Harrigan posted a letter to his Democratic rival on Twitter which said he was disappointed in how the race had taken a turn.

An open letter to Jeff Jackson.#ncpol pic.twitter.com/wzoIKdFroq

— PatHarriganNC (@PatHarriganNC) October 26, 2022

The Charlotte Observer covered the letter at the time:

He hoped for a “decent, honest, and honorable campaign,” but in the race to represent a Charlotte-area congressional district, he got an opponent’s TV advertisement filmed near his house.

That’s what Pat Harrigan, the Republican nominee for North Carolina’s 14th District, claims in an open letter to his opponent, Democratic state Sen. Jeff Jackson. Though Harrigan blames Jackson for the race’s tenor, he’s also published a negative TV ad and images critical of his Democratic opponent on social media.

In his letter, Harrigan claims the race has become so full of vitriol he now wears a bulletproof vest to major public events and has received a death threat. The letter came after the Jackson campaign ran an ad picturing one of Harrigan’s homes — in Hickory. Harrigan said the ad “went too far because targeting family domiciles crosses a line.”

If you click the letter above you’ll see that Harrigan’s main complaint was the filming of an ad in front of “one of my homes.” (Harrigan owns a gun manufacturing company and is fairly wealthy.) The video has since been taken down but here’s a description:

Jackson’s ad shows a man on a jet ski as a narrator tells listeners Harrigan “made a fortune” off of his gun manufacturing business and bought a lake house. It then shows an image of Harrigan’s lakefront home. At the end of the ad, Jackson walks across the screen and shrugs his shoulders.

It turns out there was a pretty good reason Harrigan was so upset about that ad. Today we learned that on Oct. 18, one week before Harrigan’s letter, someone fired a bullet into the house seen in the ad. That bullet came pretty close to Harrigan’s children who were asleep inside.

CJ spoke with Harrigan campaign manager Brandon Craft, who said that someone shot into the Hickory residence and that the investigation has been on-going since that time. Harrigan’s parents currently own and live in the home, but Craft said that Harrigan’s children were in the home when the incident occurred and the shot entered only a few feet from where the children were sleeping.

Hickory Police Department (HPD) responded to the incident and noted the crime was perpetrated with a firearm. Kristen Hart, a spokeswoman for HPD, told CJ that the department does not have any arrests or updates related to the incident as of publication date.

“No one was injured, but the officers investigating did find evidence of a bullet casing which is being looked into,” Hart said.

Since the person responsible hasn’t been identified no one can say for certain what the motive was here. It’s still possible this was a random incident. After all, there was a shooting outside Rep. Lee Zeldin’s house last month which was not political violence targeted at him. But in that case, two people walking down the street were targeted and shot by a gunman. In Harrigan’s case, there doesn’t appear to have been a target other than the home seen in his opponent’s video.

Given that no one was injured, perhaps the most interesting part of this story is the way that it interferes with the narrative about political violence which Democrats have been spinning up since the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi. We’ve heard quite a bit from the professional left about how the GOP has embraced violence. I saw two articles on this topic last week at the Washington Post alone.

Now we have an incident which, on its face, looks like another case of politically motivated violence targeting a Republican candidate who has received at least one death threat. Will the national media touch this story? Will it become another dot forming a pattern? Or will they ignore it and allow the left to keep insisting political violence is a right-wing problem?

Given that it has been more than two weeks since the shot was fired, I’m guessing we won’t have any answers about who is responsible before the election. That may be all the excuse Democrats need to ignore it.