There are 44,000 windows along the six-kilometer route, roughly three and a half miles, of the River Seine proposed for the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Keep this in mind as you weigh Saturday’s events in Pennsylvania, where a gunman climbed to an open roof to take shots at Donald Trump.
It is 100% impossible to secure open space.
Political violence is never the solution. But that’s thinking logically. The assassination attempt Saturday illustrates the very thing that is perhaps the key risk to the Paris Games and, in particular, the opening ceremony – the lone wolf who is himself willing to die, to perpetrate violence in furtherance of political spectacle.
This is why this column calls, again, for the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics to be moved off the river.
Twitter/X screengrab
A Black September terrorist in the Munich 1972 athletes village // Kurt Strumpf/AP
Please, Plan B. Or Plan C.
Whatever it takes to ensure the safety and security of the thousands of athletes, spectators and others.
If there is a loss of face because even at this late moment, organizers will have to do something else – so be it.
If it will cost money, perhaps a lot, because even at this late moment something else will have to be done – so be it.
To be clear:
Here is every hope the security situation in Paris for the duration of the Games is calm. In every respect.
The ceremony makes for the initial security inflection point. But far from the only one. The attack in Munich came 11 days into the 1972 Games.
We live in a world the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, rightfully calls fragile. Two ongoing wars, in Ukraine and in Gaza, have dominated attention in the West. The political situation in France is fraught. Levels of antisemitism in France are off the charts.
It’s against this backdrop that organizers propose to sail a flotilla of boats down the Seine. If you are the Israelis and the Americans, always Targets One and Two, would you – do you – feel safe?
Would you want to be on the prow of one of those boats? Out there, by yourself?
All it takes is one dude with a long rifle in one of those 44,000 windows.
A spray of bullets from one of those rifles would take — how long?
The gunman who fired Saturday was located on a roof roughly 150 meters from where Trump was speaking. As Associated Press reported, that’s the distance at which U.S. Army recruits must hit a human-sized silhouette to qualify in basic training with the M16 assault rifle.
The AR-style weapon used Saturday is the semiautomatic civilian version of the military M16.
The FBI on Sunday identified the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.
That a gunman was able to get close enough to shoot at and graze Trump is, as AP said, a “monumental failure” of one of the U.S. Secret Service’s “core duties.” One man was killed and two other people at the rally were critically wounded.
This is the precise risk of the Paris ceremony as presently constituted.
A monumental failure.
The failure Saturday was compound. For starters:
It’s not just that a shooter was up on the roof.
It’s that, as the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, he had not been on the FBI’s radar as a possible threat and investigators had found no indicators of mental health issues, according to Kevin Rojek, special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh office.
A former classmate, meanwhile, told the paper, “People would say he was the student who would shoot up high school.”
The gun used in the attack: purchased by the shooter’s father.
So – no direct, immediate link to the gunman himself.
AP reported Sunday that rallygoers noticed a gunman on the building roof and warned local police. One officer climbed up there. The gunman pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder. That’s when shots rang out toward Trump.
So – it would appear there are, at the least, an array of questions about a disconnect in communication between local law enforcement and the Secret Service.
The scope and scale of an opening ceremony is so much more profound than a presidential rally here in the United States.
Imagine the chaos and the disconnect between local and national law enforcement – the authorities in France have announced, as if to reassure, that there will be scores of thousands of police – seeking to protect hundreds of thousands of people.
From July 18 through the ceremony on the 26th, the authorities in Paris intend to create a security cordon. Access to the area around the river will be limited. You need a special QR code, which you need to have applied for in advance, to get in.
So what?
All it takes is one dude with a long rifle in one of those 44,000 windows.
You don’t think that such a dude would have thought of all those things – the QR code, laying in the rifle, the ammo, a scope – weeks or months beforehand?
To reiterate:
Here’s hoping everything goes well.
But.
We live in extraordinarily uncertain times.
France is right now unsettled.
So much better safe than sorry. The indelible image from Saturday is Trump, bloodied, fist pumped, surrounded by security, under the American flag. The indelible image from Munich 1972 is a hooded terrorist on a balcony.
No one wants an indelible image from Paris 2024 seared into the history books — for all the wrong reasons.