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Forgive me if I don't think talk of presidential assassinations is funny. Not even on Facebook.
So I'm glad the U.S. Secret Service investigated the online survey that asked whether people thought President Obama should be assassinated. They've determined it was a juvenile mistake. But assassination threats against a president are serious business. Even those who promote it in jest need to learn that lesson.
Certainly 14-year-old Julia Wilson learned it in 2006 when she posted a picture of then-President George W. Bush on her MySpace page with the words "Kill Bush" scrawled across the top with a dagger stabbing his outstretched hand. The Secret Service came to her school, took her out of her molecular biology class to question her and said she could be sent to juvenile hall for making the threat.
"They yelled at me a lot," she said. "They were unnecessarily mean."
Mean? It's time for a history lesson.
At least 15 documented assassinations and attempts have been made against U.S. presidents since Abraham Lincoln, the nation's 16th president, was elected. Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and John F. Kennedy in 1963 all died by the hands of assassins. But many other assassins have tried to join that number.
Both Teddy Roosevelt, the nation's 26th president, and Ronald Reagan, the 40th, were seriously injured by assassins' bullets. Roosevelt, making a third run for president, was shot in 1912 by a saloon-keeper while campaigning. Reagan was shot, along with three others, while returning to his limousine from a speaking engagement in 1981.
Andrew Jackson, the nation's 7th president, could have become the first president assassinated if two pistols - one at point-blank range - hadn't both misfired in 1835. Lincoln got that distinction, surviving an earlier plot to kill him in Baltimore in 1861 but felled by John Wilkes Booth four years later.
Since then, including Roosevelt and Reagan, at least 11 presidents have faced assassination attempts including Franklin Roosevelt (twice - the mayor of Chicago was killed by the assassin in one of those attempts), Harry S Truman, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush (as former president), Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
The Secret Service has legitimate concerns about threats against Obama. Since he has taken office the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 percent from the 3,000 a year or so under George W. Bush. Among them, an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.
Concerns about Obama's safety are exacerbated by a resurgence of the militia movement and other hate-mongering groups as well as a proliferation of social-networking sites and other media that make it easy for like-minded people to "congregate" and for conspiracy theories to abound. Notes Deborah Lauter of the Anti-Defamation League, "The rhetoric is some of the worst we've ever seen... Our concern is that we're seeing [harsh language] not only from those we would deem extremist ... but also that their rhetoric seems to be infecting mainstream America."
That brings me back to the Facebook poll. An astonishing 730 people had responded to its "Should Obama be killed?" query last Saturday. When Facebook officials discovered it Monday, they took it down.
As history shows, threats against a president are nothing new. Many are just people's way of letting off steam. With the country mired in a recession, fighting two controversial - and unpopular to many - wars, and disagreement over health care reform reaching a fever pitch, there's certainly been a lot of steam to let off.
But it's exactly this environment that can push unhinged people - and some who are simply overzealous - over the edge. That makes the Facebook poll not just inappropriate and illegal. Threats against the president are illegal. It's gunpowder for bombs just waiting to be detonated.
