Many Donald Trump supporters see his escape from an assassination
attempt as a divinely ordained miracle, so what does history tell us? I studied more than 260 assassinations going back to the dawn of
history for my book Assassins’ Deeds. A History of Assassination from
Ancient Egypt to the Present Day (Reaktion Books). That told me that
successful assassinations by snipers using a rifle at a distance, in other
words the method employed against Donald Trump, were extremely rare, accounting
for only four out of 266, while more than 90 of the assassinations involved
firearms at closer quarters.
Even when firearms replaced stabbing as the favoured means
of assassination in the 19th century, it was generally the handgun
at close quarters rather than the sniper’s rifle. Assassination remained
predominantly up close and personal.
There were, of course, exceptions. Assuming you accept the
official versions of events, and not everyone does, both civil rights leader Martin
Luther King in 1968, and President John F Kennedy in 1963 were shot from a
distance.
But the other three American presidents who were
assassinated, Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1881 and McKinley in 1901 were all killed
at close quarters. A sniper had tried to assassinate Lincoln in 1864, but had
hit his hat instead.
In 2003, snipers successfully killed the Serbian prime
minister Zoran Djindjić, who had helped to bring down Slobodan Milošević. He
was shot as he was going into a government building.
Then in 2010 while Thailand was bitterly divided between the
yellow-shirts, largely supported by royalists and the urban middle class, and
the red-shirts, whose members were mainly rural workers, the red-shirts’ head
of security, Major-General Khattiya Sawasdipol, was killed by a sniper, while
he was being interviewed by a reporter. Sawasdipol’s insistence on always
wearing his green military uniform among his red-shirted supporters made him an
easy target.
Perhaps the identification of 'assassin' with 'sniper' results from the success of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of
the Jackal. In it, perhaps the most famous assassin in fiction plans to shoot
President de Gaulle from an upstairs window as he is handing out decorations to
war heroes. It is hard to imagine a more meticulously planned attack, but it fails. As the assassin takes aim, the president
bows his head to kiss a wounded veteran, and the shot just misses.
A similar thing, of course, happened with Donald Trump, just
as it had in a London theatre in 1800. As King George III stood for the
national anthem, a mentally disturbed ex-soldier fired at him, but George bowed
to the audience and the shot whistled past.
In fact, most assassination attempts fail. Two American
researchers examined 289 serious attempts on political leaders across the world
between 1875 and 2007, and found that only 59, just over one in five,
succeeded.
Assassins’ Deeds
https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/assassins-deeds
