The spectre of yet another lone-wolf gunman attempting another assasination of Donald Trump is shocking, but not surprising.
Up until the past 50 years, assassinations of public figures in America were carried out by individuals with a political agenda –Abraham Lincoln (John Wilkes Booth), William McKinley (by an avowed political anarchist), Huey Long (by the relative of a political rival), John F. Kennedy (by Lee Harvey Oswald, although his exact motive has never been fully figured out), Robert F. Kennedy (Sirhan Sirhan), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (James Earl Ray).
The exception was President James Garfield’s assassin, who was suffering from mental health issues. However, the profiles of would-be assassins of public figures has changed since the 1960s. In 1972, the would-be assassin of former Alabama Governor George Wallace when he was running for president was Arthur Bremer, an individual with a long history of mental illness.
Since then, almost all of the assassins of famous figures — Pres. Gerald’s Ford would-be assassin (Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm), John Lennnon’s assassin (Mark David Chapman), Pres. Reagain’s would-be assassin (John Hinckley Jr.), and Gabby Giffords’s would-be assassin (Jared Lee Loughner) — shared one thing in common: They were disturbed individuals with a history of mental illness.
Our federal intelligence agencies have become pretty good at detecting organized threats from those who would do harm to our nation’s leaders since the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s.
But as both of the assassination attempts on Donald Trump have shown, the ability of law enforcement agencies to detect and prevent lone-wolf individuals, who have no motive other than to gain infamy (similar to those who commit school and other mass shootings), is not so great.
In addition, most of these shooters, though suffering from mental health issues, are not far enough along on the spectrum so as to trigger the so-called red flag laws that would prevent them from either purchasing a gun or having their guns taken away.
The sole goal of these individuals is to achieve the prediction that Andy Warhol popularized in 1968: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Thus, we have in our country a volatile mix of angry and disturbed individuals who have all-too-easy access to high-powered firearms, a situation that is unique among the industrial nations of the world. And as long as we have that mix of individuals with mental health issues and the availability of military-grade weapons, incidents from political assassinations to mass shootings will continue in our country’s never-ending death spiral with no end in sight.