Somebody took a shot at the President. Many people were wringing their hands about this shortly after the election, saying Obama was a likely target of violence because of the intense hatred in some quarters on the right. Now that it’s happened, the story seems to have sunk like a stone, especially compared to the Penn State scandal. What’s up with that?
The guy appears to be a lone nut, and Obama wasn’t at the White House at the time. The guy didn’t actually take a shot at the President, he took a shot at the White House. Other such incidents, where there is low risk of injury, are usually minor new stories.
Not really. The guy took a shot at the WH when Obama was not there. He may have thought he was shooting in the general direction of the president, but he didn’t.
I doubt there is a factual answer to this question.
Somebody took a shot at the White House. From 750 yards away. The fact that they even hit the building was pure luck. And Obama was 3000 miles away, in San Diego, at the time.
And it hasn’t exactly ‘sunk like a stone’; PBS Newshour devoted about ten minutes to it on their 6PM broadcast.
Because it wasn’t a real assassination attempt?
I heard he was with the OWS movement. Shouldn’t THAT be getting more press time?
Isn’t someone shooting at the White House still kind of a big deal?
Yes, which is why it made front-page headlines on every major American news site for the past two days.
If you’re going to post that in this forum, you should give a cite. Facts only, please.
Cite?
Do you remember very well the idiot who threatened Clinton, IIRC he tried to climb the fence with a handgun?
I can’t even remember, the guy with the tractor, who claimed he had explosives, was that under Clinton, or was that Dubya first term?
I’m at least a little surprised this story isn’t covered more. But like the two incidents I mentioned, these are lone, dumb, ineffectual instances. And that plays a role in people’s interest.
Eh, seems to happen every few years. Definitely something that makes headlines the day it happens, but that’s not the kind of thing that holds media interest for very long.
I seem to recall it’s happened before. Pennsylvania Avenue is a public street and there’s plenty of guns in America. So there’s really not very much to stop somebody from shooting at the White House. The guards obviously will jump all over anyone who does it but they usually get off a shot or two first.
The White House is pretty much bulletproof so it’s not like a shooter is going to get a lucky shot through a window and hit anyone inside. It’s a violent protest but a pretty ineffective one for the amount of trouble it’s going to cause the shooter.
Whoops, sorry. Here. But this says it’s not true.
I just don’t think the ‘assassination’ attempt is really a serious one any more than this guy was, you know, deeply connected to the OWS movement. My attempts at humor failed.
“He said, ‘Well, you know the president is getting ready to make an announcement that they’re going to put GPS chips in all the children, so they’re safe,’” McCall said. “… And then he said, ‘That’s just what the Antichrist is going to do to mark everybody.’”
From the AP news story. Sounds like a CT nutter, not an Occupier.
Apparently there is an Occupy group a few blocks from the White House. The police were going around asking people there if they had seen Ortega-Hernandez hanging around. Which is perfectly reasonable as part of an investigation. I’m sure the police are asking other people who’ve been in the area if they’ve seen him.
Of course, it suits some agendas to say the police are investigating a possible connection between the Occupy movement and an attempted assassination.
Yeah, these incidents are always “news” (and this one is) but not earth shattering major news. Mostly because they’ve happened to every President and because in each one of them the President’s life was genuinely never in any danger.
I can think of at least two from Clinton’s presidency, in one someone piloting a small plane actually crashed into the White House. However I believe the plane actually crashed into the lawn and then skidded into the building (which was rebuilt in the 1940s and is actually not a 19th century brick frame building but a much heavier reinforced structure), causing little damage and no threat to Clinton.
In the other incident I’m aware of an unstable guy fired off a rifle several times towards a group of people he could see through the fence, one of whom he thought was Clinton. In fact Clinton was not outside at the time and was in no danger, and the man was subdued by the crowd.
During George W. Bush’s presidency a disgruntled person (who I want to say was a civil servant) fired off a handgun towards the White House and he ended up being shot by the Secret Service.
So there’s definitely precedent for this kind of thing, and the three incidents I mentioned above were news items but no more or less so than this guy’s incident. Basically, this stuff isn’t super rare. Stuff like Reagan being genuinely hit by a bullet is much rarer, or the Puerto Rican nationalists storming the White House to try and kill Truman.
From the second link:
Early rumor that turned out not to be true.
Since the OP will be answered with a mix of facts and opinions, let’s move from
General Questions to IMHO.
samclem, Moderator
The attempt was so lame.
It would be like me taking out a pistol and shooting into a tree with the hope of killing a bald eagle when there are none in the vicinity.
There are assassination attempts and there are inept crazy people. Maybe they overlap but don’t confuse the two.
Actually, the shell is the original; the building was gutted during the Truman administration, during which time Truman lived across the street at Blair house, which is where the Puerto Ricans tried their assassination attempt.