One man murdered, another three shot and injured and a gunman killed by law enforcement personnel at an outdoor event at a fair ground in a small town. It is more accurate to describe this as a routine event in 2024 America -- one that happens weekly or monthly -- than it is to describe it as a rare or unheard of or UNIMAGINABLE event.
But wait, one of the people shot by the gunman happened to be an ex-President of the United States who happens to be running to become the President of the United States again. Surely that makes this event far more out of the ordinary, somehow far less acceptable than the idea of four random people being shot at an outdoor community event. This tears at the very fabric of our nation and its traditions of peaceful transfers of power between Administrations and the settling of political disagreements with ballots instead of bullets.
Right? RIGHT?
Well, WRONG.
In two hundred and thirty five years of operation as America 2.0 under the current Constitution, the country has seen a fairly consistent pattern of assassinations and attempted assassinations on Presidents and Presidential candidates:
- 1835 - attempt on President Andrew Jackson
- 1864 - attempt on President Abraham Lincoln
- 1865 - assassination of President Abraham Lincoln
- 1881 - assassination of President Garfield
- 1901 - assassination of President McKinley
- 1912 - attempt on former President Theodore Roosevelt
- 1933 - attempt on President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt
- 1950 - attempt on President Harry Truman
- 1963 - assassination of President John Kennedy
- 1968 - assassination of Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy
- 1968 - attempt on Presidential candidate George Wallace
- 1975 - September 5 attempt on President Gerald Ford
- 1975 - September22 attempt on President Gerald Ford
- 1981 - attempt on President Ronald Reagan
- 1994 - attempt on President Bill Clinton by shooter outside the White House
NOTE: These only reflect situations where the President or candidate actually came under fire or physical threat. There are obviously hundreds of other plots that were disrupted or averted by Secret Service and law enforcement officials.)
NOTE: For extra coincidental bonus points, guess the city where the assassination attempt on Theodore Roosevelt took place...
Now a sixteenth incident has been added to that list. Statistically speaking, the reality averages out to a much worse history than Americans likely understand or care to contemplate. Sixteen incidents over two hundred thirty five years is an average of one event every 14.68 years. Given the last incident was thirty years ago in 1994, it seems the LACK of incidents over that period was the anomaly, not the fact that a new incident occurred. In hindsight, it seems even more of an anomaly that America went forty-six years, from 1789 to 1835, before any such incident transpired.
The above list is not presented to downplay the danger posed to our political process by the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13, 2024. None of it is intended to cynically chalk it up as inevitable and a reflection of "modern America" unworthy of attempts to understand the causes and unworthy of attempts to correct them. Indeed, one immediate consideration that should come to mind after reading the above list of violent attacks is how it might compare to a list of similar violent events in other modern industrial democracies. A bit of Google searching turns up something like this:
- 1605 -- attempted assassination of British King James I
- 1820 -- assassination plot targeting British PM Liverpool
- 1887 - assassination plot of British Queen Victoria by Irish nationalists
- 1945 - attempted assassination of French provisional government chair Charles de Gaulle
- 1961 - attempted assassination of French PM Charles de Gaulle
- 1962 - attempted assassination of French PM Charles de Gaulle
- 1973 - assassination via car bombing of Spanish PM Luis Blanco
- 1984 - assassination attempt of British PM Margaret Thatcher in Brighton (IRA)
- 1986 - assassination of Swedish PM Olaf Palme
- 1991 - assassination attempt of British PM John Major at 10 Downing (IRA)
- 1994 - assassination of Mexican Presidential candidate Luis Colosio
- 1995 - attempted assassination of Canadian PM Jean Chretien
- 2011 - assassination attempt via bombing of Norway PM Jens Stoltenberg
I won't claim this to be a complete list but spending an extra sixty seconds reading each search result that came up points out a key distinction between these incidents in other countries and those in the US. In these other countries, the majority of these events were OVERTLY political or terroristic in nature. In the American events, the EVENTS may have taken place during periods the rest of us might think were fraught with politics but the actual motivations of the assailants were rarely grounded in any concrete association of their act to some multi-step chain of events leading to a rationally expected outcome related to their political view. Instead, their motivations were predominately -- in a word -- crazy. While most of these US assailants were convicted of various attempted murder charges, most also seemed paranoid, delusional or outright insane. Few (notable exception being John Wilkes Booth) were found to have acted in concert with anyone else.
So America's actual political history is more consistently tainted with violence than we understood or cared to admit. Does knowing that help unite people in a better direction to avoid such violence going forward? The answer to that question is tied to how Americans think about guns, rights and public safety. It's useful to divide such thinking into two binary choices to allow each to be boiled down to its reductio ad absurdom argument to better highlight the truthfulness or fallacy of each.
On one extreme, much of the discussion after this recent event could be boiled down to this:
Whatever our problems are, we MUST keep violence out of our politics to ensure politicians do not scare away from public office and ensure they feel they can rationally debate the great issues involved and lead us. Our leaders simply MUST be protected from this violence.
Lurking as a parenthetical thought after that position is an additional caveat... Our leaders simply MUST be protected from this violence, even as the rest of us dodge gunfire every day at school, on the roads, in grocery stores and at open-air music festivals.
Isn't that a little crazy?
The argument there is that essentially, some people, like important government figures, are more important than others in our society. We've been conditioned by seventy years of cold war history to believe this, at least in regards to the President, to ensure someone is there to answer the "red phone" or green light a nuclear missile counter-strike.
Is any President MORE deserving of protection than ONE average citizen? Ummmmm. Proooooooobably. Is the President more deserving of protection than a classroom full of children? No. Is the President more deserving of protection than hundreds of people being sprayed with automatic weapon fire at an outdoor country music festival? No. I don't know where the line is between those yes and no answers but the fact that we have encountered dozens of the latter scenarios with no rational political reaction to those horrors indicates a model focused on uber-protection at the top doesn't break political logjams that block progress needed by the rest of us.The opposite extreme might be this:
This is a reminder we can't be perfectly free and free from risk at the same time and a world of gun rights makes possible freedom from tyranny. I prefer a world free of tryanny protected by guns over a world of reduced gun rights and reduced gun violence that I think is more at risk to tyranny. The only effort compatible with maintaining gun freedoms and attempting to reduce violence is to ensure everyone is a tactically trained sharp shooter to take out the crazies before too many get killed in any one incident and let that be a lesson to the rest of the crazies to think before they go crazy.
Isn't THAT kinda crazy?
That's a philosophy that depends upon the criminally insane, paranoid or suicidal to correctly process a higher risk of getting killed in the act of committing their crime and decide NOT to commit their crime because they can follow that logic and value their own life. Such expectations of "rational thought" on the part of murderers not only fly in the face of not only our history of political assassinations and attempts but our larger history of gun violence and mass murderers.
Between those two extremes is another "thought space..."
In a country with mass shootings certainly every week and shooting deaths every day, why would any American expect the resulting carnage to somehow magically avoid any event featuring a politician? Even the President or an ex-President? Imagine for a moment the Secret Service and law enforcement officials could deliver PERFECT protection for some designated portion of federal and state leaders. Now ask the "Get Shorty" question? What's my motivation? What's my motivation to solve a problem affecting other people's safety when I am immune to those safety risks and I've perfected a political position based on the status quo that assures my re-election and/or my financial well-being?
Now ask the really important question.
If the government was able to perfectly protect the leaders in charge from the risk of harm directly attributable to problems they not only refuse to correct but are exacerbating with additional extremist laws and legal rulings, is a goal of providing perfect protection for them while accepting the inevitability of violence for the rest of us as we literally dodge gunfire every day an ethical strategy?
That's not kinda crazy. That's nuts.
WTH
