On Sunday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had to be whisked away while members of his Secret Service detail fired upon an apparent would-be assassin who they had spotted pointing an assault-style rifle toward the golf course Trump was on. We’ve reached an inflection point in our society. We can’t keep the most vulnerable among us, our school children, safe from shooters, and now we can’t guarantee the security of the most protected high-ranking officials in and around our government.
It’s time to ask whether we’re OK with ignoring the root cause of this lunacy. I, for one, am not.
Sunday’s incident was another close call just two months after the attempted assassination of Trump at an open air rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The Secret Service internal report on its own lapses, which led to eight shots fired at Trump by a young sniper on July 13, was scathing. Yet, despite all their obvious mistakes that day, we’ve essentially dumped a now virtually impossible task on the lap of federal agents and told them to figure it out. That task, to guard the lives of their protectees in outdoor settings, including in the 31 states that allow citizens to walk around displaying a gun, in a nation with 20 million assault-style rifles, defies logic. Something must change.
