Alison Patton
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
President Donald Trump has now been in proximity to an active shooter or attempted assassination and survived at three different events.
Law enforcement is working to learn more about 31-year-old California man Cole Tomas Allen, who was arrested Saturday evening after reportedly firing several shots during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Trump was the target of two apparent assassination attempts, one in Butler, Pennsylvania, at a rally where his ear was injured in July 2024, and on a West Palm Beach, Florida, golf course a couple of months later in September 2024. Both attempts happened while Trump was campaigning for his second term.
“There have been 45 presidents, four of them have been killed in office, which means for any given office holder, you’ve got about an 8% chance that you’re going to get killed in office. It’s a pretty dangerous job, if you think about it in those terms,” said Charles Zug, a political science professor at the University of Missouri.
The presidents killed were Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.
Eight other presidents had at least one assassination attempt, with Harry S. Truman and Gerald Ford surviving two attempts each. JFK had one assassination attempt before he was shot and killed in 1963.
Zug said there are a couple of ingredients that make recent assassinations — like the one of political commentator Charlie Kirk — and attempts at political violence so frequent.
“It’s just much easier for the individual to bring about violence on a mass and rapid scale than it was even 40, 50 years ago,” Zug said. He attributes this to evolving weapons technology and the relative ease of obtaining a gun.
Zug also said normalized gun violence could be a contributing factor.
“In addition to that, you have constant exposure that we all have to mass shootings, you know, in schools, churches, and public scenes. It’s just all around us, and it didn’t use to be that way,” Zug said.
Heather Overstreet, a radio talk show host and political activist from Boonville, said she is disappointed that political violence keeps happening, referring to Saturday’s events at the press gala.
“I would like to do what the president asked us to do, which would be to resolve our differences without violence,” Overstreet said.
Boone County Democrats Chair Deborah Finley said she was horrified.
“The level of violence in this country is just ramping up, and there is no room for violence in any of our political lives, so we condemn it. We condemn any violence,” Finley said. “Violent rhetoric on either party’s part is wrong.”
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