A man was charged with the attempted assassination of US President Donald Trump after allegedly opening fire at the annual correspondents' dinner.

Well, they’ve gone and charged a man with trying to take out the President at a dinner for the press, which I suppose makes sense if you don’t think about it too long, which is probably the idea. It’s one of those things that sounds real complicated when the lawyers start talking, but when you strip away all the legal jargon and the big headlines, it’s just another way of saying that the folks in charge have lost track of how to keep the peace in a room full of people who are paid to talk.

Now, the official word is that we’re looking at a serious matter of national security and political violence. And it is. But when you look at the way things are running, it feels a bit like a rancher who spends all his time building a bigger and more expensive gate, only to realize he forgot to check if the cattle were still jumping the fence. We’ve got all these layers of security, all these protocols and secret service details, and yet a man still managed to bring a bit of chaos to a room full of reporters. It’s a lot of expensive effort to achieve the same result we’ve been getting for years - a lot of noise and not much quiet.

The lawyers and the prosecutors are busy looking at the “who” and the “why,” trying to figure out if this was a grand political statement or just a man having a very bad afternoon. They’re looking for motives in the deep shadows, while the rest of us are just looking at the daylight. It’s a bit like trying to figure out why a horse kicked a bucket by studying the history of grain prices. You can look at the paperwork all you want, but , a horse kicks a bucket because it’s a horse and the bucket was in the way.

And you can see both sides of the aisle getting ready to use this like a new brand of cattle prod. One side will say it’s proof that the country is falling apart, and the other side will say it’s proof that the security was just poorly managed. Both sides are essentially saying the same thing: that they’ve got a better way to run the ranch, even though they’re both currently standing in the middle of the same mess. It’s a beautiful thing, really. They’ll spend months debating the details of the shooting, and by the time they reach a conclusion, we’ll have moved on to a new way of being surprised by the old way of things.

The real worry isn’t just about the man with the gun; it’s about the fact that we’ve made politics into a spectator sport where the players don’t realize the stands are part of the arena. We’ve built this whole system of grand speeches and televised debates, and we’re surprised when the energy from the screen starts leaking into the streets. It’s like inviting a thunderstorm to a garden party and then acting shocked when the cake gets wet.

In the end, we’ll have more hearings, more charges, and more press releases. We’ll have experts explaining exactly how something happened that anyone with a pair of eyes could have seen coming. But as for the rest of us, we’ll just keep watching, waiting to see if the next big event is going to be a policy change or just another reason to check our locks. I reckon it’ll be a bit of both, and we’ll probably be just as surprised as we were the last time.