Was Trump’s escape a miracle, or predictable? A historian of assassination sheds light

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 19^th 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

Diary Date - flood talk October 9

I'm giving a talk entitled 'Are floods getting worse? at Swiss Cottage Library on October 9 at 1830, based on my book Flood: Nature and Culture.  Admission free.  All welcome.   

Last year, the UK’s Environment Agency issued a record number of flood warnings, while also in the last few years, Pakistan has had its worst monsoon floods in eight decades, Thailand suffered one of the costliest inundations in history, Colombia and Brazil experienced the severest in living memory, and Australia’s prime minister declared the Queensland floods perhaps the worst natural disaster ‘in the history of our nation’.

So are things actually getting worse? I will be revealing that floods are the natural disasters humans are most likely to experience, and that some of the most ambitious structures ever built have been put up to defend us against them.

I will also be telling how stories like that of Noah’s ark, about an apocalyptic flood which almost wipes out humanity, feature in dozens of religions all over the world. Floods caused by rain, melting snow, storms, tsunamis, tides, the failures of dykes or dams, or deliberate act of war all feature.

The talk will also look at the way floods have been portrayed in films, literature and art.

Road accidents becoming no 1 killer

Fascinating piece in the Economist of Jan 25 on road accidents. At present, they kill about 1.3 million people a year – not far short of the number who lose their lives to tuberculosis, but the World Health Organisation expects the total to reach nearly 2 million by 2030, well outstripping tb deaths and catching up with AIDS as a killer.

The biggest increase is expected in the poorest countries, with deaths almost tripling. One of the main reasons being that when money is invested in new roads, little is spent on safety.

Already, road crashes are the main cause of death worldwide for people aged 15 to 29, with most victims men and boys. In poor countries, most of the people killed are pedestrians, while in developing countries such as Thailand, it tends to be motorcyclists.

In the developed world, better safety measures have seen road deaths actually being reduced. New York now has fewer than it did 1910, while Sweden has halved the number since 2000, cutting them by 80% since 1970.

*My updated website - http://www.disasterhistorian.com/index.html

Night club fires

Brazil has declared three days of national mourning for the 231 people who died in a fire at the Kiss night club in the southern city of Santa Maria.    It is said to have started when a member of the band playing there lit a flare on stage.  One band member was killed.

Most of the victims are believed to have perished from inhaling toxic smoke from foam insulation on the ceiling.  There are claims that people could not escape because there was only one emergency exit, and that at first security guards stopped them leaving before they had paid their bills.

According to reports, the club’s fire safety certificate expired last year.   Fireworks or flares were involved in other major night club fires in the United States in 2003, Argentina in 2004, and Thailand and Russia both in 2009.

Probably the deadliest night club fire of all time happened at the Cocoanut Grove in Boston during World War Two, when 492 people died.   It was believed to have been started when a junior member of staff lit a match to try to find a light bulb he had dropped on the floor.  For more details see A Disastrous History of the World.

The growing cost of disasters

The Economist ran a fascinating piece in its January 14 edition on the growing cost of disasters.   Five of the ten most expensive disasters in history have happened in the last four years, and a leading reinsurer, Munich Re, reckoned 2011 was the most costly year in its history.

The most expensive disaster ever is last year’s Japanese tsunami, followed by Japan’s Kobe earthquake of 1995, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.   Most expensive does not mean highest number of casualties.      The Japanese tsunami cost fewer than 16,000 lives, Kobe 6,400 and Katrina 1,300, compared with a quarter of a million killed in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, and perhaps a similar number in the Haiti earthquake of 2010.

One reason for the growing cost of disasters is that there are more and more human beings around to suffer losses.   The population of hurricane-belt state Florida, for example, has risen from 2.8m in 1950 to 19m now.

And overall human beings are getting richer so there are more things to be destroyed, while sometimes not enough thought is given to where development takes place.   Thailand’s growing industries, for instance, have been located in areas known to be vulnerable to flooding.

Thailand floods

More than 250 people have now been killed in the monsoon floods that have been affecting Thailand for the last two months.    Twenty-eight provinces have suffered, and more than two million people have had their lives disrupted.

These are said to be the worst floods in half a century, and the Prime Minister has warned that parts of Bangkok will soon be under water.     In some areas, people have been told to beware of crocodiles which have escaped from farms.

Last year saw monsoon floods across 38 provinces of Thailand, and more than 230 people were drowned, while millions more lost their homes and their livelihoods.

This years’s floods have also killed 167 people in Cambodia, and another 40 in Vietnam and Laos.

Bird flu

Egypt has just reported its third case of bird flu in humans this year, while China says that four people have died from the disease in 2009 – the latest a 31 year old woman in the Xinjiang Uygur region in the north-west of the country. China has also been accused of covering up an outbreak of the disease in poultry after more than 20 dead birds were washed up on beaches in Hong Kong. At least three have tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus.

The World Health Organisation reported 348 cases of the disease in humans up to January 2008 across 14 countries. Two hundred and sixteen of those infected had died. That represents a death rate of more than 60% - stoking fears that if the strain ever did manage to pass from human to human it could threaten us with a pandemic on the scale of that of 1918 in which perhaps 70 million died, including a quarter of a million in Britain (see A Disastrous History of the World and A Disastrous History of Britain).

So far, mercifully, there has been little evidence of transmission of H5N1 from human to human apart from isolated cases in Thailand and Vietnam.