Assassination attempts and plots on Presidents of the United States have been numerous: more than 20 attempts to kill sitting and former presidents, as well as the Presidents-elect, are known. Four sitting presidents have been killed: Abraham Lincoln (the 16th President), James A. Garfield (the 20th President), William McKinley (the 25th President) and John F. Kennedy (the 35th President). Two presidents were injured in attempted assassinations: Theodore Roosevelt (the 26th President) and Ronald Reagan (the 40th President). With the exception of Lyndon Johnson, every president's life since John F. Kennedy has been threatened with assassination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...mpts_and_plots

what's your point?

USA #1

pretty f'ing clear to me...

Add to that CIA sponsored drug running into U.S. cities, mind-boggling levels of banking fraud, devolving pop culture, extreme income inequality, the privatization of most everything and the championing of systemic, willful idiocy by conservatives regarding most every aspect of civic debate... = A pretty diseased society.

It won't get better, barring some radical change. The people don't even seem to really want it to.

you ****ers should of practiced avoidance.

Habit change is a slow drawn out process.

You are not going to change anyone's mind overnight. It takes a constant reminder of the issues. I don't even know what the hell im talking about here. I had too many margaritas at dinner tonight.

Those are some symptoms, to be sure Jiggs. Some others are police abuse, torture at home (like solitary confinement and experimental executions) and abroad, extrajudicial killings of U.S. citizens by drone, massive spying architecture spanning the whole world (complete with Star Trek command lunatic commander's deck), and mass shootings.

But in addition there is literal madness underlying in the form of a mental health epidemic.

And, back to a symptom, we are increasingly shuttering our mentally ill into jails and prisons.

lol @ crackpot assassination plots as evidence of American crazy. You don't know what crazy is. We'll show you crazy.

Oh yeah, AND we nuked people when we didn't have to. Afterward we cheered. We are straight up psychopathic as a nation.

We killed 100,000 people instead of losing 1,000,000 of our own in a land invasion. We're just bat**** crazy I guess.

Not gonna pick up on this potential derail but there is a thread in the history forum dealing with this.

Thread explodes.

Another way to put this is that at least 0.0000003% of the population has threatened to assassinated the President.

I really don't see how this should drastically alter your perspective. There are thousands of horrific crimes committed every year, but somehow, the fact there are common threats to assassinate the President is the thing that makes you think Americans are maniacs?

If you think that's bad, you should see the attempts by GoT book readers to spoil show watchers.

In before the atf thread in defense of maniacs.

i guess those were the only two options...

That Salon article is terrible for myriad reasons. Do you seriously read that and give a nodding approval? I guess you do.

So Obama doesn't agree we are maniacs, or maybe he does but he won't attribute our actions to it. In response to yet another school shooting (74 school shootings in the U.S. since the Newtown massacre) Obama said:

So his argument is the rest of the world is just as crazy as us. That seems like a blatant expression of denial. We can't even acknowledge the problem here so there are no prospects for dealing with it. The fact is there are plenty of guns in other places that don't have this problem, and our rates of crazy are higher than anywhere else, as are our rates of denial and aggression. If mass shootings at schools as a norm don't clue you in as to America being bat**** crazy then nothing can discredit the illusion of national sanity. It's as if denial is built in feature of our crazy.

Are you denying the mental health epidemic in this country? If so I can't accuse you of bias since it will keep you employed going forward. Your field is projected to grow rapidly, I hear second hand. You should have something to say about the topic other than nitpicking at popular articles designed for casual readers.

You presented it as evidence to support your claim, not as a suggestion to your reading group.

This isn't a colloquium in any strict sense. There is supporting evidence in the article. At the same time it's supposed to be easy reading, an introduction. I also listed other symptoms as evidence, as did Jiggs. Do you have anything to say about that? Ok yes the Salon article on a public health issue doesn't meet the standards of an academic paper. Any other insights?

We've killed each other for thousands of years and only recently advanced understanding of why to a place where violence can be freely known as rooted in fears and power struggles; personally understood as a surmountable challenge. It's always going to be a uphill battle for humanity to finally shed political violence but never say die, say live. It the same thing but a better perspective. The hippies are correct.


Oh and **** all that nationalistic bull****. World peace is the nut peace. The hippies are correct. Go hug a tree and find somebody to make love if you haven't tried it.

Seventy-four! OMG what are we going to do???

Oh wait, that number came from Everytown for Gun Safety, started by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. No bias there.

If a drug deal went wrong at 2AM near a school, they would count it too. Turns out the correct number by CNN's count is.....15 (now that's 15 to many, but still a far cry from 74)

Oh and one of the 15 was the UCSB thing last month. and he was never on campus. Counting that we have 12 deaths by firearm + 3 by knife Since Sandy Hook (there may be other fatalities by knives in schools, I didn't look)

So 9 total deaths by firearms on campus since Sandy Hook.

CNN story: http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/11/us/sch...gs-cnn-number/

"He was never on campus". Thanks that made my day. That's funnier than any intentional humor I got today. You think you are advancing the idea that America's not crazy by quibbling about how to properly report the absurd number of school shootings.

Didn't he shoot students at a sorority house? Ok just googled that all six victims were students at his school. You're gonna not count that? You're going to roll your eyes at counts of school shootings?

See, you are a victim here. Remember this: no gun can save you from your own mental illness.

But despair not. Seek help through obamacare. Let him help you. You can get excellent advice and assistance from the system he has set up with our tax dollars and loans from China. You can visit a state trained counselor who will help you work through that anger and get to acceptance of things that might be agitating you, such as: anchor babies, the prospects of gun control, precious metal price fluctuations, gay marriage, and fiat currency. Now, you might be thinking, "state trained? no thanks!". But don't worry. Obamacare counselors are competent, union sanctioned professionals.