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By Rabi Raj Thapa

The shooter was not sharp enough to get right on the target and the former President Donald Trump was lucky and smart enough to dip down the podium to protect himself from any further attempt. This event has once more raised a question of Silenced Doves (peace lovers) and Roaring Hawks (fighters) flaring up fiercely in the U.S. election campaigns.

The whole episode of a failed assassination attempt on Trump has exposed the gun culture of America once more where young boys infatuated with guns and firearms who had previously attacked and killed so many school kids, common public in the malls and police officers have threatened and challenged the nation as a whole. Now only the difference this time it has happened to the former President who also loved such a tantrum that he could inflame and utilize it to his advantage.

From the security point of view – the incident in terms of planning, coverage, protective detail and follow-up response has raised many questions unanswered even for the well-advanced U.S. Secret Service and other responsible agencies. In this particular case, it is said that the shooter was spotted by a spectator and flagged to the security personnel 26 minutes before the first shot was fired; still he was able to shoot from just 150 feet away rooftop towards Podium where Trump was standing and addressing the crowd.

The most important question is what made a 20-year-old boy like Timothy Matthew Crooks intend to kill top leaders like Trump? Professionally, he was not a military veteran and not a snap-shot sniper too; then what motivated him to do that? That is a big question. According to his former colleagues, he was good in academics, he was quiet and gentle with only one peculiar nature that he wanted to live alone and he was a loner. We can see such types of youths in abundance in Nepal too. This pathology of social deviance which experts call a Phantom of Complicit is grabbing Nepali youth excessively day by day we can see in accelerating self-killing we call suicide. Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has termed it as potential act of domestic terrorism.

In Nepal, former prime minister and the then senior leader of the UML, Jhal Nath Khanal was slapped on his cheek by his own communist cadre Devi Prashad Regmi in 2011. Nepali Congress president and former prime minister Sushil Koirala was also physically assaulted by his cadre during a mass meeting in September 2012. Maoist Center chair and former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal was boxed on the nose by his own cadre in their party’s grand ceremony on November 16, 2012. It shows cases of physical assaults on top political leaders of Nepal too.

Nowadays there is ever growing feeling of endemic inequality and loneliness triggering frustration and aggression tendencies leading to violence. Today, the erosion of political credibility is nose-diving along with the collapse of cultural edifices caused by a culture of impunity, endemic corruption and political horse-trading. Today, there is an ever-increasing flare of partisan identity conflated with race, ethnicity, and religion that can trigger social groups to conflicts, violence and even assassinations in the coming years. During the armed conflict years of 1996-2005, Nepalis have already experienced these in the rural villages among the lower strata of Nepali society. Chief of Armed Police Force Krishna Mohan Shrestha was assassinated by the CPN (Maoist) hit-men on January 26 2003.

Let’s hope, all VVIPs and Security Agencies of Nepal will learn the lesson from this right in time. God Bless and Protect Nepal. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.