Anxiety 2020: Voters worry about safety at the polls
WASHINGTON – Gary Kauffman says he does not scare easily. So when men waving President Donald Trump flags drive by his house in downtown Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he stands on his front steps and waves a banner for Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
“Sometimes I yell at them. They yell back at me,” says Kauffman, 54.
Still, Kauffman is keeping a closer eye on who they are and what they’re carrying as Election Day approaches. Tension has been rising in his town, known best as hallowed ground of the Civil War’s bloodiest battle. Recently, it’s become a hot spot of angry confrontations between Trump supporters and liberal protesters. Kauffman has seen some of the Trump supporters carrying weapons.
“If there’s guns, I’m a bit more cautious,” he said on Monday.
Americans aren’t accustomed to worrying about violence or safety ahead of an election. It’s a luxury afforded by years of largely peaceful voting, a recent history of fairly orderly displays of democracy. But after months filled with disease, disruption and unrest, Americans are worried that Election Day could become a flashpoint.
With Election Day next week, voters can point to plenty of evidence behind the anxiety. More than 226,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States, and cases are spiking across the country. A summer of protests of racial injustice and sometimes violent confrontations has left many on edge. Gun sales have broken records. Trump has called on supporters to monitor voting and has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power or to explicitly condemn a white supremacist group.
There was the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and another spate of violent protest this week over a police shooting of a Black man in Philadelphia.
“Human beings don’t do well
not specify when he arrived in Nice.
In Tunisia, the anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office said an investigation was being opened on the “suspected commission of a terrorist crime by a Tunisian ... outside national borders,,” the official TAP news agency quoted the prosecutor’s office as saying.
The French prosecutor said the attacker was not on the radar of intelligence agencies as a potential threat.
Video cameras recorded the man entering the Nice train station at 6:47 a.m., where he changed his shoes and turned his coat inside out before heading for the church, some 400 meters (yards) away, just before 8:30 a.m.
Ricard said the attacker was carrying a copy of Islam’s holy book and two telephones. A knife with a 17-centimeter blade used in the attack was found near him along with a bag containing another two knives that were not used in the attack.
He had spent some 30 minutes inside the church before police arrived via a side entrance and “after advancing down a corridor they came face-to-face with (the attacker) whom they neutralized,” Ricard said.
Witnesses heard the man crying ”Allahu Akbar” as he advanced on police. Police initially used an electric gun then fired their service revolvers. Ricard said 14 bullet casings were found on the ground.
Ricard detailed a gruesome scene inside the church where two of the victims died. A 60-year-old woman suffered “a very deep throat slitting, like a decapitation,” he said, and a 55-year-old man also suffered deep, fatal throat cuts. The third victim, a 44-yearold woman, managed to flee the church alive but died at a nearby restaurant.
Laurent Martin de Fremont, of the police union Unité SGP Police said the man was a sacristan at the basilica.
The three were killed “only because they were in the church at that moment,” Ricard told reporters. He said investigators are looking for potential complicity in the “complex” probe.
An investigation was opened for murder and attempted murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise, a common term for such crimes.
The attack in Nice came amid a fierce debate in France and beyond over the re-publication of the Muhammad caricatures by satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
The French consulate in the Saudi city of Jiddah was also targeted Thursday, a man claiming allegiance to an anti-immigrant group was shot and killed by police in the southern French city of Avignon, and scattered confrontations were reported elsewhere, but it is unclear whether they were linked to the attack in Nice.
France’s national police chief had ordered increased security at churches and mosques earlier this week, but no police appeared to be guarding the Nice church when it was attacked, and Associated Press reporters saw no visible security forces at multiple prominent religious sites in Paris. French churches have been ferociously attacked by extremists in recent years. Thursday’s killings come ahead of the Roman Catholic All Saints’ holiday.
It was the third attack since Charlie Hebdo republished the caricatures in September as the trial opened for the 2015 attacks at the paper’s offices and a kosher supermarket. The gunmen in that attack claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group and al-Qaida, which both recently called anew for strikes against France.
A verdict is planned for Nov. 13, the fifth anniversary of another series of deadly Islamic State attacks in Paris.
The recent attacks come amid renewed outcry over depictions of Islam’s most revered prophet – whose birthday was marked in several countries Thursday – and the French government’s fierce defense of the right to publish and show them. Muslims have held protests in several countries and called for a boycott of French goods.