Public Comment

New: SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces: Shooters & Looters

Gar Smith

Tuesday April 22, 2025 - 11:56:00 AM

Assassination Nation

How do we know that America is one of the world's leading gun-loving nations? Consider: four of our sitting presidents (nearly one-in-ten) have been killed by gun-wielding assassins. Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963) all died from an assassin's bullet. Ronald Reagan (1981) is the only president to survive an assassination attempt.

According to Wikipedia, the list of presidents who were targets of assassination plots include: Andrew Jackson, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Franklin G. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.

Assassination Motivation

In recent months there have been two assassination attempts targeting Donald Trump. The odd thing here is that no one seems to have discovered—let alone publicized—the shooters' motivations.

On July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump was nicked in the ear from a round fired by an AR-15-style rifle fired by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Oddly, in coverage of the crime, no mention was made regarding Crooks' motivation.

On September 15, 2024, Ryan Routh has been charged with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, following a Sept. 15 incident at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course.

At his first court hearing, the prosecution presented a letter Routh had written detailing his assassination plans. But no motive was cited. In an October 2, 2024 story, Newsweek reported: "While a motive for the assassination attempt is yet to be determined, he was strongly critical of Trump's foreign policy decisions in the same note in which he described the failed assassination attempt."

In a related note, a photograph of Routh (one that shows him with war-paint plastered on his cheeks) was taken during an interview in the Ukrainian capitol of Kiev.

Pick of the Pics

The recent "Hands Off" rallies (held in each of the 50 states) were enlivened by chants, speeches, drumming, posters, T-shirts and placards with political slogans and slanders ranging from the witty and pithy to the ribald and hard-boiled—a visual feast for photographers.

So, too, the signs raised by the crowd gathered at Sproul Plaza for an April 17 rally to protest King Trump's authoritarian battle to steer the country's universities from a free-flowing democracy down the ditch to a full-blown autocracy serving the wishes of the nation's banks, corps, and oligarchs.

One of the media savants at the UC rally was Bay Area photojournalist James Lerager whose lens captured images of the event that are now posted online at this link: 250417 UCB-Sproul Action_Photos-JLerager.jpg

Robert Reich at April 17 UC Berkeley Rally