Two assassination attempts on Donald Trump in recent months. That’s…that’s something I can’t recall ever happening in my lifetime. I suppose it’s a good sign none of them were time travelers, at least.
Either way, it’s stirred up the gun debate in this country.
Which is insane to me. After all, none of these should have gotten as close as they did and the Secret Service needs to shoulder at least some of the blame for that.
But some want to not just give them a pass, but punish the rest of us for their failures.
The recent findings of a man positioned at former President Donald Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, raised questions nationwide on the effectiveness of our current Secret Service. While these questions may be important, they take away from the greater question of the entire situation: why are we allowing people with these motivations to own guns?
While it is true that Trump receives significantly less security detail now that he isn’t the incumbent president, whether he needs more detail is the answer to a small portion of the bigger problem. Gun control needs to be a top priority. This situation, while not mismanaged, could have been avoided, or even eradicated, had the United States had stricter gun laws. Instead, officials and citizens alike intend to keep finding a different part of the problem to blame; this time, it was the Secret Service.
The problem is not the Secret Service. While it’s old news that the Secret Service has been struggling with staffing for a decade now, it came to light recently following the second assassination attempt. Gun violence has been rampant for years. We have lost children, teens and adults to different gun-related incidents. Yet, every time this happens, citizens wonder why it happened again. This past event happened because we didn’t have the laws and restrictions needed to prevent it. America doesn’t care. While the Second Amendment is an important amendment to uphold, there are ways to honor it and still have policies in place that keep Americans safe from gun violence.
So the author admits that the Secret Service is struggling and that Trump lacked the detail he once had, but no, they’re not at fault for allowing a would-be assassin to get on top of a roof with a clear line of sight within easy gun-shot range in Butler, Pennsylvania. Nor are they at fault for not securing the perimeter of a golf course the former president would be on just weeks after an assassination attempt against him. Further, the would-be killer in that case was exploiting a known vulnerability that they never bothered to shore up.
But we shouldn’t blame them, really.
Instead, what we should do is punish every law-abiding American who wants to protect themselves.
Never you mind that the would-be killer in Butler could have carried out the exact same attack with a bolt-action rifle–like what Lee Harvey Oswald owned, for the record–and he had absolutely nothing in his history that would have barred him from owning a gun in the first place. So just what gun control laws would have stopped him?
In Florida, the would-be assassin was a convicted felon who had a semi-automatic gun that was exempted from the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban. The serial numbers had been destroyed, meaning it was obtained illegally.
On two different extremes, we see how little gun control would actually accomplish.
Especially if you somehow think that you can uphold the Second Amendment and still infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. Tell me you’ve never read the Second Amendment without saying you’ve never read the Second Amendment.
The truth of the matter is that the Secret Service has been dropping the ball. For the most part, it hasn’t mattered all that much because most attacks never get to the point of having a weapon in that kind of proximity to the protected individual. This time it did. Twice.
So now we know how bad the Secret Service is at their job. Either that or they’re only assigning agents who want Trump dead, too.
Neither is comforting.
Read the full article here
