On July 13, 2024, then-candidate and former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in Butler, PA. It seemed fitting to schedule this post to coincide with the anniversary of that event. Obviously, that was real and Eric wrote this years before that attempt so the only relationship is the topic, but Eric wrote about fictional asssasination attempts within the context of how they have unfolded historically and the historical outcomes versus was the assassin/attempted assassin wanted. Within the 1632verse, the assassination of Mayor Dreeson is, I believe, the most impactful one on the people within the Ring of Fire. Spoiler: Eric’s conclusion is that strategically, assassination is a terrible choice, and is fully separate from targeting leaders on the battlefield during active military engagements. I’m not Eric and I didn’t know him personally, but I would guess – based on having read a great deal, at this point, of what he posted – that he makes his argument in this way because it’s harder to argue with facts and figures than feelings, and those facts and figures fully support the strategic argument. It’s harder to find numbers to support a moral argument, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t agree with it. That just means he chose not to include it in this pair of posts. – Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine) Baens Bar 22 November 2016 08:13 Mutter. People keep misconstruing my attitude toward assassination. It’s not fundamentally moral, it’s strategic. As a tool of statecraft, the track record of assassination is utterly abysmal. Once in a while, an assassination accomplishes the purpose of the assassin (or the people behind him). Probably the best modern example was the assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by the right-wing fanatic Yigal Amir. The assassination pretty much accomplished Amir’s purpose, which was to swing Israeli politics drastically to the right and foreclose any possibility of a peace settlement…