A Relevant True Story

With everything going on with the Trump Goat Rodeo lately I wanted to recount a relevant short story to you good folks my late father told me many years ago.

My father was a hardcore hunter and outdoorsman since his youth. The man loved to hunt and fish more than anything in the world. In 1972, two years before my birth, he went on a hunting trip to Wyoming with a group of four friends to hunt Mule Deer and Antelope. The plan was to drive from our home (then in Central Texas) to Casper, Wyoming, stay the night and then the next morning get up and drive to the staging area 3 hours away near Cody and then pack in on horseback to the hunting camp. My dad said the 20 hour drive up was uneventful, each man taking shifts driving and sleeping. When they arrived at the motel in Casper late that evening they checked in into their rooms and in typical fashion loaded up all their firearms and brought them into the rooms with them. My dad said he had just got out of the shower and was getting ready to go to bed when there was a knock at the door. Puzzled, he glanced out the window and there outside was two uniformed cops and two men in suits. When dad opened the door, the men all identified themselves with ID and badges. The two uniformed LEO were sheriff deputies and the two men in suits were U.S. Secret Service. With the door open, Dad happened to look down the hall where the other two rooms were and his friends were having the exact same kind of visitors.

Dad said the Secret Service guys explained that the next morning “Very important people” would be coming through town and as a precaution everybody in the hunting party would have to surrender their firearms. Dad explained they were expecting to get up early the next morning and drive to Cody to pack in for a hunt and the Secret Service guy told him plainly those plans would have to wait. So, in very quick fashion, all of dad and his buddies hunting rifles, handguns and ammunition were “sequestered” (Dad told me they did give him and his friends receipts for everything) and then they were told they could come and pick up the guns and ammo the next morning at the police station at 11am, which they did without incident.

I asked Dad if he saw any “Presidential Staff” come through the next morning and he said he never did, but that doesn’t mean it did not happen. This was in late September of 1972 so Nixon would have been President at that time with the November elections soon coming up. Dad said he had read in the local papers that morning that Nixon had a campaign rally in Cheyenne the previous day so he figured it was Nixon’s forward detail clearing a path for him to travel North.

I tell you this story dear readers to make this point: If in 1972, fifty-two years ago, the Secret Service was this cautious about Security, how is it in 2024 a twenty-year old kid with a rifle was allowed to climb up on a roof 400 feet from the former President of the United States?

Does that seem plausible to you?