You know, I made a point of saying that, while gun crime is a lot rarer outside the US, it still does occasionally happen. So, yes, if I’d said what I totally didn’t say, you might have made a valid point.
My point is that the type of weapon has nothing to do with it. A crazy person will still find a way to kill you if you don’t have adequate security, much like the Anna Lindh situation. There was a lot of discussion in Sweden regarding this after Lindh’s murder.
It was his own idea to tell the bodyguards that they could go home and from that on the guards won’t listen to what the object has to say.
As it happens I once met him walking about without any guards. I thought he looked a bit worried but I had no idea that this was going on as I found out later in the evening.
And my point was that gun crime is a lot more common in the USA than it is in the rest of the developed world. Which is unrelated to your point. Yes, bad things also happen without guns, but since I didn’t deny or in fact say anything at all about that fact, why are you acting like I did?
Because guns have got bog all to do with it. Crazy people that might want to kill you are the problem.
I remember that when Breivik’s bomb exploded in Norway, a commentator mentioned that there was a bar on this square where the king would often come to have a drink. Difficult to imagine Elizabeth II doing the same thing.
Obviously a micro-state but I remember the interview of a former Luxemburg’s minister of economy where he said that sometimes, disgruntled citizens would just show up at his home to complain about his policies.
I don’t really see much logic in associating general gun crime with political assassination, they are two vastly different animals. Lots of totalitarian states with extremely strong anti-gun laws and little to no legally owned firearms have, for example, assassinations and such all the time.
The Presidential security you see for American Presidents has little to nothing to do with general American crime trends, as violent crime rates in America have continually fallen since probably the late 1970s while the Presidential protection detail only gets more and more elaborate. The simple truth is the President is the world’s biggest bulls eye and there are tons of domestic and international persons who would love to kill our President to a far greater degree than any other national leader.
Probably the closest would be the Pope, who attracts a great deal of “crazy-attention” because of his unique position, and who consequently these days has a very strong security presence.
Crazy people with only knives can be handled with smaller security details than are called for when there is an increased possibility that crazy people will be able to acquire firearms.
The best thing is, they’re discrete and discreet.
From Wikipedia:
A plot to kidnap [British Prime Minister Alec] Douglas-Home in April 1964 was foiled by the Prime Minister himself. Two left-wing students from the University of Aberdeen followed him to the house of John and Priscilla Buchan, where he was staying. He was alone at the time and answered the door, where the students told him that they planned to kidnap him. He responded, “I suppose you realise if you do, the Conservatives will win the election by 200 or 300.” He gave his intending abductors some beer, and they abandoned their plot… Douglas-Home never publicly spoke of the kidnapping because he did not want to ruin the career of his bodyguard but told the story in 1977 to [Viscount] Hailsham, who recorded it in his diaries.
Time was when the Prime Minister, (Clement Atlee at the time) could take his annual holiday in the Irish Republic quite anonymously, without being exposed to anything more hazardous than Mrs. Attlee’s notoriously bad driving.
But Clem Atlee was said to be so totally nondescript that people wou8ld hardly even notice him, let alone recognise him.
"A modest man with much to be modest about. " - Churchill (attrib)
“All substance and no show” (Thatcher)
“An empty taxi arrived. Out stepped Atlee” (Anon)
Who are most (all?) of the google image search results for “David Cameron’s daughter” pixelated around her face? [hyperbole] Everyone in the world knows what Sascha and Malia Obama look like. [/hyperbole]
The current PM and his wife lost a young child. As did the previous PM and his wife. And the PM before that nearly lost an older one.
The first few pages of “David Cameron’s daughter” aren’t pixilated from a UK Google search, as far as I can tell
nm
The mayor of Chicago was in my spinning class a few months back. And while a* big black SUV came to pick him up, he had no bodyguard during the class.
BTW, he’s healthy as hell: he was chatting away (in a low voice) with the guy next to him during the class. 
I rarely have enough breath during spinning class to say more than three words in a row.
*One, mind you, not a motorcade. And it had a bike rack on the back.
There’s the story about the time Mister Margaret Thatcher went to some little music festival or something in the backwoods of Wales. He stayed at some small quaint little inn; when they asked him to sign the register he wrote “Dennis Thatcher”. The innkeeper said “very funny, now sign your real name.”
I think too we’ve forgotten how greatly the scale of government has changed since the 1950’s. All those massive departments to examine medicine, consumer goods, water quality, manage telecommunications and banking and the environment and you name it, hiring legions of engineers an accountants and scientists and secretaries and file clerks… a lot of that has happened only starting in the 960’s. Before then, government was important but not really big. A lot of the importance comes from heading an organization that spends hundreds of billions of dollars, much much more than 50 years ago. Along with the size of government and its budget has come the importance of the leader, the size of his entourage, and the size of the target on his back.
Hmm. I think this got twisted around a bit.
First of all, I don’t think there are/were any real bars on the square around the Government Quarter. Plenty of cafes and coffee shops, sure, but it was kind of dead at night even before that idiot blew a great bloody hole in it.
Second, I don’t think poor King Harald is allowed to go out for a drink 
Have some friends over to the private quarters in the Palace, sure, but kings are supposed to keep a certain amount of decorum in public.
Now, I could definitely see the Crown Prince and Crown Princess stopping at one of those cafes or coffee shops for a coffee drink - they’re both known to be fond of coffee, and have been seen carrying paper take-out cups. And the Prime Minister certainly has visited those places for lunch or a cup o’ joe. Maybe that got a bit twisted up.
It is certainly true that the King and Queen travel with little or no visible security. You better believe the body guards are there, but they do not try to be obvious. And after the attacks, when the King and PM and other officials met, one of the first things they all wanted to bring up was the importance of getting the soldiers off the streets of the city as soon as it was safe to do so. (By the time we got home, a week later, the cordoned-off area had shrunk to about two blocks, the Parliament Building and the Palace were no longer blocked, and the soldiers were long gone. But you could barely move at the square in front of the Cathedral, for the people and the roses and the TV trucks :()
So it predated the Norman Conquest by a century? I had no idea!
The sort of place you take kids into is not called a pub either. It’s probably called a Harvester, which is a building which once might have been a pub, but is more likely to have been thrown up in the past 20 years, furnished with shite from a central warehouse - stuff like old church pews, wrought iron farming implements and stone flagons marked with “Ye Olde Ale”. They will apparently serve Stella, but get so little of it through the pump (because the building is not placed to be anyone’s local within walking distance, so no serious drinkers come in) that it will taste like piss. Flat piss. On the other hand, they will happily charge you an arm and a leg for an orange juice and lemonade, after filling 75% of the glass with ice, and they will keep a straight face whilst they do it.
These places excel at “Pub Grub” which is a British Tradition where “kitchen staff” (as opposed to “Chefs”) will skilfully lob your scran into a microwave to finish it to perfection, it having been delivered by a Brake Brothers refrigerated truck that very morning with the rest of the menu. Extensive training ensures your meal pings at the exact time your chips come out of the deep fat frier. Hmmm, yummy. Banoffee pie for dessert?
If you are lucky, there may be a monstrous shed made of corrugated iron tacked onto the side of the “pub” which will resemble the monkey house at Twycross Zoo. Having amped up your snot-nosed kids on fizzy pop and crisps, you can let them loose inside this building to shake it all up until they are ready to spew all over nice Uncle Cornholio’s new shirt when he tries to be helpful and pick up the little shit who is crying after being launched out of the ball pit by bigger kids.
This “pub” will be choc-a-bloc in school holidays and at weekends, but expect to be given a frosty welcome after 8.30pm, they will be winding down to close by then. “The chef” will be clearing up (or rather, the work experience kid will have wiped out the microwave) and the staff will eye you suspiciously if you just want an alcoholic drink and are not interested in Sky Sports. You are probably one of them weirdos who wants to go to a pub and wind-down. Eeewww.
Real pubs should be devoid of children at 7.30pm sharp, and possibly wives/girlfriends of the excessively stroppy variety too. It is acceptable to leave any minors you have been unable to offload out in the beer garden with a packet of crisps and a bottle of coke. If they are well-behaved (ie. you don’t hear a peep from them, yet don’t have to send out the police helicopter to find them after they wander off down the canal towpath in the dark), it is acceptable to buy them a glass of Shandy Bass. They can then pretend to have been out supping piss with their coolest uncle ALL night, and when their mother smells their breath, she will believe every fucking word of it and you will never hear the last of it. On the plus side, you are excused babysitting duties FOREVER.
So, real pub = Lots of proper beer and lager - no Blue WKD, no fridges with more non-alcoholic beverage than booze; no kids; no stroppy birds; no telly (unless it’s a tiny CRT behind the bar, tucked behind the till, that you can’t actually see properly); no poncy food - only Pork Scratchings, Ready Salted crisps and Big D peanuts (displayed on a card with a picture of Beverly Pilkington. It is acceptable to have alternative brands, featuring up to the minute modern models like Donna Ewin or Linda Lusardi. These ladies must be oh-so-close to having their nipples shown, but bar staff must be trained to only take the packets from the part of the card covering her lower leg, or Hurricane fucking Higgins, so no-one ever gets to see “the reveal”); no ball pits; no jukebox; no uppity parents who get shirty when you stride into the bar, catch sight of your mate and shout “Heyyyyyy Tom, you dirty old cunt! How’d you get on last night with that bird with the massive tits? Let me smell your fingers you fucker!”
I mean, come on, if you don’t want your kids to enjoy interacting with adults and learning new words, stay the fuck out of anywhere they serve alcohol after 7.30pm, or live with the consequences - (“Mummy, what’s a cumguzzler?”).
Acceptable pub games are skittles (with an oche screwed to the floor just outside the ladies’ toilets, perfectly placed to trip any woman who has managed to escape the curfew, thus showing that they really can’t handle their drink, that’s why they are falling all over the place. Time to go home pet.), darts, cards and dominoes. Anything that looks like it came from a giant’s Toys R Us (ie. Connect 4), or has a large Health and Safety notice next to it, or instructions, is prohibited unless you are a pretentious ponce.
The Holy Grail of pub games is Bar Billiards. Just put your 20p on the side, if you aren’t a local then your turn will be sometime next Tuesday. Oh, and we play Midland League rules here (Version 38c), so in fact, your turn is next Thursday. At 1.15pm.
Special Branch detectives are allowed in, but only if they don’t sup too much and have to be held back by their client (“Leave him Wilson, he’s not worth it, let’s go back to Chequers and you can have a dip in the pool and Sam will bring us bacon butties, won’t you sweetie? Are the kids still outside in the snow where we left them?”) - they invariably are tooled up and this is very unsporting, especially in light of the demise of the good old glass pint mug, every man’s weapon of choice when it all kicks off, even if you are a big Wendy who is drinking halves out of a straight glass.
Oh, and if you are walking home after a lock-in, remember to stay off the moors and stick to the path.
God I need a pint…