Will the 2024 election get derailed by tragedy?

Americans have a long history of trying to assassinate their Presidents and Presidential candidates

There have been 46 Presidents of the United States since independence day. Assassination attempts have been made on many them, not to mention other prominent leaders like Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Steve Scalise. Most people have forgotten just how dangerous it is to run for high office in America.

Here’s a list to give you pause.

January 30, 1835 - Richard Lawrence tried to assassinate President Andrew Jackson but his two pistols didn’t work.

April 14, 1865 - John Wilkes Boothe assassinates Abraham Lincoln. A co-conspirator was a Canadian, a nice little piece of history trivia.

July 2, 1881 - Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield who died a few weeks later from a gangrene infection of the wound. Guiteau was executed for the crime. His weapon was a Webley British Bulldog 44 calibre revolver. The use of a British gun rather than an American weapon may have been a message.

October 16, 1909 - Julius Bergerson lay in wait to shoot President Taft but was captured and disarmed a few feet away from the President.

October 14, 1912 - John Shrank shot Theodore Roosevelt with a 38 calibre Colt “Police Special”. Roosevelt survived, Shrank declared insane spent his life in an institution and died 33 years later.

November 19, 1928 - Severino De Giovanni led a group intent on blowing up Herbert Hoover’s train in Argentina on a goodwill trip, but was arrested before he could place the bomb on the tracks.

February 15, 1933 - Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at President Franklin D. Roosevelt, missing the President but killing the Chicago Mayor and wounding bystanders. He was executed for the crime.

November 1, 1950 - Oscar Collazo and Grisselo Torresolo attempted to kill Harry Truman while Truman was living at Blair House during a White House renovation killing a policeman and wounding another. The dying policeman killed Torreselo while Collazo was sentenced to death later commuted by Truman and eventually released by Jimmy Carter who commuted his sentene to “time served”.

December 11, 1960 - Rchard Pavlick planned to assassinate John F. Kennedy (JFK) by ramming a dynamite filled Buick into his motorcade, abandoning the plan but later arrested with a car filled with dynamite.

November 23, 1963 - JFK was assassinated, possibly by Lee Harvey Oswald but there is conflicting evidence as to who fired the fatal shot with at least one eyewitness claiming the shot that hit Kennedy came from the “grassy knoll”.

April 13, 1972 - Arthur Bremer brought a firearm to shoot Richard Nixon during Nixon’s visit to Ottawa but Nixon’s vehicle passed too quickly to get a good shot. Bremer later shot and seriously wounded George Wallace.

February 22, 1974 - Samuel Byck intended to crash an airliner into the White House (maybe gave the idea to Osama Bin Laden?), hijacked a DC-9 but was shot by police before he get get it into the air after killing both pilots.

September 5, 1975 - Lynette Fromme (a Charles Manson follower) attempted to kill Gerald Ford with a Colt 45 but while the gun was loaded she had not taken time to ensure a round was in the chamber and failed.

September 22, 1975 - Sara Moore shot at Gerald Ford but missed, and spent 30 years in prison for her crime.

March 30, 1981 - John Hinckley Jr. came close to killing Jimmy Carter during the Carter campaign but lost his nerve, only to attack Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. It seems Hinckley was at least bipartisan.

1994 - 1996 - There were five failed attempts to kill Bill Clinton

May 10, 2005 - An attempt to kill George W. Bush during with a grenade during a trip to Tbillsi, Georgia, failed when the device failed to detonate. His father, George Herbert Walker Bush, had been the subject of a plot to kill him on a trip to Kuwait April 13, 1993. Seems that trips abroad were dangerous for the Bush family.

2008 - 2013 - There were six attempts to kill Barack Obama including by mailing letters containing the poisin “Ricin” to him and a plot involving a pipe bomb.

Since that time, there have been two attempts on Trump and at least one on Biden.

United States today is a divided nation with strong animosity across party lines. It is an environment typified more by hatred than by mutual respect or even common sense. The efforts to destroy Donald Trump’s dreams of a second term in the White House seem to know no bounds and the dislike for Biden is palpable in the polls. Both mean are at some non-zero risk of violence. I hope not, but the statistical record suggests it is not only possible that one or both of these candidates will suffer assassination attempts but that it may even be considered likely. The lack of any convincing resolution of the debate over the “Deep State” theory that the CIA or FBI took out JFK is bolstered by the obvious leftist bias the three letter agencies have demonstrated by misleading citizens about the Hunter Biden laptop or orchestrating a needless raid on Trump’s Mara Lago home.

It seems to me that with assassination attempts approximating half the number of U.S. presidents ever to hold office, the chances of an attempt on the candidates for 2024 are somewhere in the 50% range and the risk of a successful assassination attempt cannot be much less than 10%.