Assassinations

This week was the first anniversary of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

Most political assassination attempts have little or nothing to do with politics. John Hinckley Jr shot Republican Ronald Reagan but had earlier stalked Democrat Jimmy Carter. I read an account that he also once targeted Democrat Edward Kennedy. Arthur Bremer shot Democrat George Wallace but had earlier followed Republican Richard Nixon. 

These conspiracy theories are part of the price that we have to pay for living in a free society. The only way to be free of "fake news", or bizarre conspiracy theories, is to give someone the power to decide for us what is and isn't worthy of attention. But then that person would have the power of a dictator and we would no longer be free. 

It is interesting that the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13, explains that there will be an assassination attempt on the Antichrist. It seems that he will suffer a deadly wound but will apparently come back to life.

ALL IMAGES ARE FROM GOOGLE EARTH OR STREET VIEW 

The red dot shows the position of the shooter on the rooftop, in Butler PA, when the shots were fired. The white dot shows the position of Donald Trump when hit by the bullet. 

This is the site of the John F. Kennedy Assassination, in Dallas in 1963. The vantage point is where Kennedy was struck looking back at the building, to the left, from where the shots were fired. 

Within three years of the Kennedy Assassination the modern era of mass shootings began, also by a sniper in a high position, from the tower of the University of Texas. 

What I have never seen pointed out about the Kennedy Assassination is that not far away lived an eight-year-old boy named John Hinckley Jr. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself assassinated two days later, as he was being moved through the garage of the police station. The gunman, Jack Ruby, waited for Oswald while pretending to be a reporter. Eighteen years later Hinckley would adopt Jack Ruby's tactic while waiting to shoot Ronald Reagan. This is the site of the attempted assassination of Reagan, outside the Hilton in Washington. 

Does anyone remember Marcus Sarjeant? If you don't that's a good thing because the gun that he fired at Queen Elizabeth when she was riding a horse along the Mall, in 1981, wasn't a real gun. It was a racing starter pistol. Here is the site of it. 

Not far from here is the site of the assassination of William McKinley, in 1901. He was visiting what was then the Pan Am Exhibition, in Buffalo.

THE LINCOLN-KENNEDY PARALLELS 

The two most discussed assassinations of American presidents are of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy and there are some amazing parallels between the two. 

Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846 and to the presidency in 1860. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946 and to the presidency in 1960.

Both were succeeded by their vice-presidents named Johnson, born in 1808 and 1908. 

Both assassins, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, have 15 letters in their names. Both carried out the assassinations at their jobs, Booth at a theater and Oswald at a school textbook building. Both escaped before being caught and killed. John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate sympathizer while Lee Harvey Oswald was named for Robert E. Lee.

Lincoln was assassinated at the Ford Theater. Kennedy was assassinated in a Lincoln car, made by Ford, and had a secretary named Lincoln. 

Both were shot in the back of the head, with their wives by their side, on a Friday.

Lincoln's assassin ran out of the theater where the assassination had taken place. Kennedy's assassin ran into a theater, where he was captured. 

THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS OF SEPTEMBER 1975

Does anyone remember that there were two assassination attempts on U.S. President Gerald Ford, within three weeks of each other? Both were by women. 

Gerald Ford was never elected as president. Spiro Agnew was Richard Nixon's Vice President, but resigned because of tax evasion, and Nixon chose Ford to take his place. Nixon then resigned because of the Watergate Scandal and Ford found himself as president. Before this, Gerald Ford had been best-known for being on the commission that investigated the assassination of John F Kennedy.

The first assassination attempt was by a member of the Manson Family but who had not been involved in their notorious murders. Lynette Fromme had been one of the early followers of Charles Manson. 1969 was a time of great racial tension and the group believed that the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible would begin with a race war in America. On two successive nights members of the Manson Family committed two sets of horrific murders. The best-known victim the first night was actress Sharon Tate, and a party was going on at the house. A grocer and his wife were murdered on the second night. 

A musician had been invited to the party but didn't go, possibly due to too much partying the night before. He was from Buffalo and his name was Rick James.

They set it up to appear that black militants had done the killings, which would hopefully set off the race war and the Apocalypse. After that, according to the group's plan, Charles Manson would reign over the world as Christ. 

Lynette Fromme had not been involved in the murders but remained a devout follower of Manson afterward. She pointed a gun at Gerald Ford but there was no bullet ready to fire. Everything about the assassination attempt was red. Lynette Fromme was wearing red, her hair was red, and it was purportedly about saving California's redwood trees.

Within three weeks, Sara Jane Moore tried to assassinate Gerald Ford with a gun. Her purported motive was to start a revolution in America.

Both women would escape from prison but would be recaptured. 

In the posting "The Adventures Of Lost People", we saw how people are designed to believe in something and when they don't believe in God they will just replace Him with something else. In our secular age, replacements for God are often nationalism or political-economic ideologies. 

How many people have you known whose country or political-economic ideology is their "religion"? The would-have-been assassin of Donald Trump, in July 2024, is an ideal example. His "religion", that he was willing to sacrifice his freedom or his life for, was his political ideology.

THE ONE-SHOT HERO

To understand these assassination attempts we have to understand the concept of the "One-Shot" Hero. That is the best term that I can think of for it but the "shot" doesn't necessarily mean a gunshot.

A One-Shot Hero is someone who was previously obscure but becomes a well-known hero by some single action. This does not apply to a hero in a disaster or emergency, it must be an action that the hero initiated. 

The modern era of the One-Shot Hero began with Charles Lindbergh. In 1927 he was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. He wasn't the first to fly across the ocean, two British pilots had flown from Canada to Ireland years before. But it made him a national hero and a public figure for the rest of his life. 

There is an avenue nearby named for Charles Lindbergh.

Niagara Falls has always been an avenue for One-Shot Heroes. People who have successfully gone over Niagara Falls in barrels are usually portrayed as heroes. But the list of people show that they have never been heard of before, or usually since. Well-known or successful people don't try to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. They tend to be people who have never succeeded at much, or are down on their luck. If only they can pull off going over the falls they will be a One-Shot Hero. This doesn't apply to tightrope walking, which takes a lot of skill. 

Defectors during the Cold War were often looking to be One-Shot Heroes, expecting to be welcomed and get a lot of media coverage in their new country. A U.S. Army sergeant named Robert Lee Johnson slipped into East Germany, wanting to defect. The Communist officers who interviewed him soon evaluated him as an amoral loser with a grandiose sense of his own importance, hardly the kind of person who would be useful to their cause. They persuaded him to stay in the U.S. Army and procure secret documents for them.

Perhaps the classic would-be One-Shot Hero is Lee Harvey Oswald. His first attempt was to defect to the Soviet Union. He expected to be welcomed as a hero, imagining that his having been a radar operator with the U.S. Marines had given him technical knowledge that would be very valuable to the Soviets. Assigned to live in Minsk, Oswald clearly expected to be feted as a hero by the local people, and ultimately re-defected to the U.S. 

His second attempt to be a One-Shot Hero did literally involve shooting a gun. It was the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. This time his goal was another Communist country, Cuba. It was following the Cuban Missile Crisis and Oswald was convinced that killing Kennedy would make him a national hero there.

This brings us to the modern era of the assassination of a public figure as the route to being a One-Shot Hero. Almost always, an assassination attempt on a political leader or candidate has nothing to do with their politics. Sometimes it is to draw attention to an issue, whether saving redwood trees or starting a revolution, as with the two attempts on Gerald Ford. But it is more often simply a nobody wanting to take the One-Shot Hero route to being a somebody. A number of assassins, or would-be assassins have said something like "I just wanted to be somebody".