It's not a matter of the Secret Service's efforts; it's a matter of determination. This is an important concept here... it's why the war on terrorism is such a joke. You cannot prevent a determined and halfway competent individual from building a bomb, period. It takes a more determined individual to assassinate someone protected by the Secret Service, but not *that* much more.
Case in point: Reagan was seriously wounded by a raving lunatic with a .22 revolver. They had 18 years after JFK was shot to tighten their security, but it only goes so far. If the president is willing to go out and mingle with the common folk, and there is a significant minority of common folk willing and able to assassinate him, then that president will probably be assassinated.
Imagine a few thousand people like Hinckley, a few thousand people with the necessary resolve to do such a thing. Now imagine that at least 10% of them are competent. That's what Obama has to defend himself against. If you don't think that there are at least 1000 gun owners in this country that would earnestly believe that President Obama is the Antichrist... well, you obviously live in a blue state.
To the person who said that radical Christians are all talk... again, you must come from a blue state. Sometimes the crazies go out and shoot someone, or they blow up an abortion clinic, or they tie someone behind a truck and drag them until they die. It's a tiny minority of a tiny minority, but in a country of 300+ million I think it still adds up to thousands of potential assassins.
Re:Gringinho, I highly doubt the SS cares about me. It should be clear by now that I don't want to see Obama dead, and I'm hardly the only one talking about the possibility of an Obama assassination... even Clinton mentioned it.
I am not and will not be discussing hypothetical assassination ideas more detailed than "determination + gun or bomb". The latter is plentiful in this country... that's a given. The point of this post is to say that, if Obama is elected, there will be a very sharp increase in the former.
And it worries me. It should worry everyone here. Left or right, it's a lose/lose situation. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if voting McCain is the right thing to do. Ideally I would much rather have President Obama, but it wouldn't be long before President Biden is ramming the anti-gun "Obama Bill" through congress... maybe even a constitutional amendment to repeal or "clarify" the second amendment.
(Just to be clear here, I'm anti-gun control and pro-Obama, largely because the republicans of the past decade have proven themselves utterly incapable of anything other than warmongering, huge deficits and religious pandering.)
