How Short Our Memory, How Profitable the Click-Bait Article

The BBC ought to know better.

Anthony Zurcher is the North American correspondent for the BBC (British Broadcasting) writing a weekly US newsletter. I don’t know how long he’s been at it, but he ought to polish up on a bit of American history.

A week ago there was a second attempt to assassinate Donald Trump

No shots were fired, and Trump was nowhere near the shooter while playing golf. The Secret Service took a couple of shots that ran him off and he was captured hours later. Not a good thing by any means, but hardly worth Zurcher’s hysterical headline:

Political violence becomes America's new norm - but is still shocking

He’s right about gun violence, it’s way out of control, but one shot at candidate Trump, and a second lurker, is hardly a ‘new norm’ in political violence. Being pretty much a non-gun nation, Brits prefer knife-crime for doing in their fellow citizens, but Zurcher is negligent in his research. He might do well to check back on November 22^nd of 1963.

That was when President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas

Any American who was alive that day remembers exactly where he was at the time. In my case, I was twenty-eight at the time and about to have lunch at my parent’s home. The radio was on in the kitchen, and we were soon gathered in the library where the TV was located. Tears were running on all our Republican faces.

But that was surely not a norm. Tragic, and nearly unthinkable, but a long way from a norm.

The Kennedy assassination was followed in quick-step by three others; his brother Robert, a campaigning candidate for president, Martin Luther King, Jr, national leader of the Civil Rights Movement, and Malcome X, an African American revolutionary, Muslim minister and human rights activist.

Those tragedies occurred some sixty years ago, and a bullet-nick on a candidate’s ear pales by comparison

Not to take lightly the Trump shooting, yet our recent and tragic history of school shootings and multiple gun deaths across the nation are not, and will never be, accepted as ‘America’s new norm.’ Nor would I dare to characterize knife-crime in Britain as a ‘new norm.’

Sloppy work, Mr. Zurcher, to say the least.