If Trump Can Be Shot, No One Is Safe, Say Furious Foes of Guns in America

Social media is exploding over the bloody impact of guns in America in the wake of the chilling assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally.

The fact that Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents and protected by snipers, could be shot and his face spattered with blood at the start of his address in front of thousands of spectators, underscores the extreme vulnerability to guns of the average citizen, including young schoolchildren, angry critics noted Sunday.

Besides injuring Trump, shooter Thomas Matthews Crooks also killed a spectator and critically wounded two others, according to the FBI.

The shocking violence is something already experienced by thousands of Americans in a nation where gun ownership is ubiquitous, noted the social media posts, with some calling Republicans and Trump complicit in the bloodshed for supporting firearms.

Trump said after his own shooting Saturday that it's "incredible that such an act can take place in this Country."

Crooks was armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic assault-style rifle, favored by mass shooters, which Republicans have opposed banning. Trump vowed to the National Rifle Association earlier this year that if he is elected president "no one will lay a finger on your firearms."

"Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day," Trump said at the NRA's Presidential Forum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in February.

He repeated the pledge in May at the NRA's annual Leadership Forum in Dallas.

The number of mass shootings so far this year has already far surpassed the mid-year totals from a decade ago, though the numbers are down from last year, according to the latest statistics of the Gun Violence Archive.

"Stop talking about good guys with guns, and start doing something about the GUNS," Parkland High School mass shooting survivor David Hogg wrote on X early Sunday following the attempt on Trump's life.

Parkland father Fred Guttenberg, who lost his 14-year-old daughter, Jaimie, in the 2018 shooting that killed 17 people, posted a photo of her Saturday on what would have been her 21st birthday.