On October 23, 2011, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez piled into his car in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and set off on a cross-country trek to Washington, D.C.  He did so with a clear purpose.

He had to kill President Barrack Obama.

Ortega-Hernandez was convinced the Obama-led government was going to implant GPS monitoring chips inside the bodies of all Americans.  This evil plot had to be stopped.  And Ortega-Hernandez was just the person to do it.

Nineteen days later, he sprayed multiple rounds from a Romanian GP WASR-10 rifle at the White House, some hitting the second-floor presidential residence, before speeding away.  It would take stunned authorities three full days to identify him, track him down, and place him under arrest.

All of this barely made a splash in the media.  No one was killed or even hurt, and in a country awash with guns, don’t these things sometimes “just happen?”

Ortega-Hernandez wasn’t alone.  Over Obama’s eight-year term, the FBI foiled at least a dozen assassination plots against the President, including one by a high-ranking member of (wait for it) the Ku Klux Klan. 

And of course, there was Francisco M. Duran, who fired 29 rounds from a Russian SKS rifle at the White House in 1994.  His plea of temporary insanity somehow didn’t sell with the jury.

Assassinations and assassination attempts have long been the staple of third-world countries.  But among developed nations, the United States has no equal.

Whether it’s an attempt to change the course of history or act out some delusional fantasy, any American with a gun, an element of advanced planning, and a little bit of luck can get close enough to take a potshot at the President.

John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln because Booth was outraged that Lincoln had the audacity to go to war to keep the United States together.  After firing his weapon into the back of the President’s head, Booth leapt from the balcony and shouted “thus always to tyrants!” before fleeing.  (Those weren’t his exact words, of course.  What he actually shouted was “Sic Semper Tyrannis!”  But it’s always more impressive when you can say it in Latin).

Over a hundred years later, John Hinkley, Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in the chest as he stepped out of the Washington Hilton Hotel.

Hinkley‘s noble cause?  He thought it would impress the actress, Jodie Foster.

Perhaps Hinkley was only following what might be called the assassination-attempt fad of 1970’s America.  After all, within weeks of one another, two women in California had previously attempted to gun down President Gerald Ford.  Neither one could really explain why.

Which brings us to Thomas Crooks.  A quiet kid from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, Crooks had no previous interactions with law enforcement nor history of mental illness.  But he spent days searching the internet for locations of political rallies for both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, respectively.  He settled on a Trump rally in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania. 

When he was finished, one person was dead, and a President escaped with nothing more than a grazed ear.  Crooks was quickly located and killed. Law enforcement searched on-line records and interviewed friends and family.  To date, no clear motive has been found.

The Trump assassination attempt was only the latest in a long line of such efforts.  Some have been close calls.  Some have been almost comical in their stupidity.  But all have had one thing in common.  In each instance, the potential assassin was able to access a firearm about as easily as most of us can place an Amazon order.

Before anybody gets their knickers in a twist, I’m not saying guns should be banned.  I’m not saying the government should confiscate your firearms.  I’ve written about this before.

I’m talking about common sense here.  An AR-15 assault rifle is not a thirty-aught-six deer rifle.  A semi-automatic attached to a bump stock isn’t the same as a bolt action .22, regardless of what Clarence Thomas says.

A firearms approach that interprets the second amendment to mean that anybody can carry any gun anywhere at any time for any reason is a formula for disaster, regardless of what Samuel Alito thinks.

The idea that the solution to public safety is for more people to carry more guns more places is nuts, regardless of what the NRA tells you.

The notion that the best way to protect schoolchildren is for teachers to walk around carrying weapons is downright crazy.  Plenty of school shootings have occurred even when armed and fully trained security guards were present.

In case your counting, 180 school shootings have occurred in this country since 1999.  Many more have taken place at festivals, nightclubs, concerts, and even churches. 

And last week, a duly elected Kentucky Sheriff assassinated a duly elected Kentucky Judge.  The Sheriff’s beef?  They’d had an argument.

So maybe we should consider this.  What if the framers of our constitution had foreseen where our current obsession with firearms has taken us?  What if they had seen mass shootings and road rage killings?  What if they had foreseen children going to school in terror?  What would they have thought?  What would they have done?

If you ask me, they would have probably torn up the second amendment and started over again.

If you wish to own firearms, fine. As I’ve said before, I grew up with guns in rural Missouri.  But use common sense, rather than thinking you’re some kind of patriot because you can fling a gun around everywhere you go.

If you choose to own a gun, take a long hard look at Switzerland.  No, not the myth of Swiss gun ownership.  The real Swiss story.

Because unless we can return to the kinds of common-sense gun laws that existed in this country for over 200 years before the Heller decision, we will continue to kill ourselves off.

So put the President and all presidential candidates behind plexiglass, if you’d like.  Keep them hundreds of feet from rally participants.  Use body doubles, as many dictators are known to do.  Keep them locked away from the public, for that matter.  It’s not going to make any difference.

Assassination attempts will continue, and some will succeed.  It’s now as American as apple pie.

Just like mass killings of children, church members, and concert-goers.

But it’s really OK.  It’s just the price we pay for our freedoms, right?

Or is it the price we pay for our stupidity?

POSTSCRIPT:  This post was originally written earlier this month in a cabin some 9000 feet in the Colorado Rockies, just south of the Wyoming border.  There was no internet access. 

Since coming back down to Nebraska, I’ve learned of yet another foiled assignation plot. Ryan Routh appears to have travelled from either Hawaii or North Carolina to Mar-a-Lago, Florida, secured a rifle, and hung out in the woods surrounding the Trump golf course for 12 hours, hoping to get a shot at the ex-president.  He was apprehended before he could do so.

At first, I thought about rewriting this post to include this event.  But what would be the point?  Nothing has changed.  Rather, this attempt simply confirms our country’s dire situation.

When it comes to issues of mental health, Americans are no more screwed up than citizens of any other developed country.  American kids are influenced by the same movies, internet sites, music, and videos that impact kids all over the world.  Just as many Europeans think they’re Jesus, or controlled by Martians, influenced by alien brain waves, or some other delusion, as we Americans.

The difference is, we wind up killing each other way more often than they do.

Fifty years ago, no one could have imagined that, despite billions of dollars of incredibly sophisticated security technology, presidential assassination attempts would become routine in America.  But fifty years ago, no one would have believed we would see mass shootings in schools, theaters, and churches becoming so common they would hardly raise an eyebrow.

Sadly, all of these tragedies will continue until we’ve decided we’ve had enough.

At what point will this happen?  Who knows?

But in the meantime, it’s becoming more and more obvious that our national fetish for firearms is not protecting our democracy, as many wish to believe.

Rather, coupled with rising extremism, it may well be our nation’s greatest threat.