This month, after a school shooting in Georgia claimed four lives, Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, argued that school shootings are just a “fact of life.”

“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” the Ohio senator said. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.”

Less than two weeks later, after what appears to have been a second assassination attempt against Trump, it now looks as though even “hard” targets — the once and perhaps future president — are a lot more soft than we would like them to be. In our gun-mad culture, we can keep neither our schoolchildren nor political leaders safe.

Now will come more, necessary efforts to fortify the Secret Service. President Joe Biden acknowledged this on Monday when he said the Secret Service “needs more help.” But there’s only so much “hardening” of targets, whether schools or presidential candidates, that can be done. A civilized society can’t ignore the obvious commonality between the assassination attempts and the Georgia school shooting: They all involved assault rifles. It was an AR-15-style weapon in the Georgia school shooting and in the first attempt against Trump. In Florida on Sunday, the suspected gunman had an SKS-style rifle with him in the bushes on the golf course a........

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