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"Going out in public" and debating people is hardly something that takes immense courage. I did policy debate in college -- where's my statue?
Before this, public figures generally didn't worry that much about their personal safety. Random crazies have always been a threat, but they're relatively rare compared to all the public figures going out into public. Maybe that's slowly changing as the US becomes more sectarian?
Get a bruise doing it and we can consider a plaque.
This is nonsense, you're old enough to remember people like Milo, Shapiro and Peterson getting threatened off campus, the armed thugs running Evergreen, Carl Benjamin stealing a flag off antifa thugs coming to brawl him off stage, Andy Ngo getting concrete milkshaked and so on. We talked about it all at the old place.
The only difference is that ten years and a few attempted presidential assassinations later, we've graduated to people who can mount scope rings on their guns and actually aim them.
Murderous communists have been there the whole time, and that's why even Kirk had an extensive security detail. Just not one with counter snipers.
Sure you can list off individual incidents, but again they pale in comparison to all the public figures that have ever done public events in the past decade+.
And yes, as I said there have always been crazy people, but it hasn't been an undo concern for politicians relative to other public figures. Sure, they have security details, but Taylor Swift also has a security detail and it's not like she's running for office, or even regularly giving political hot-takes.
Cars aren't dangerous, you can list off individuals accidents, but people drive to their destinations unharmed everyday.
Sure they have safety belts, but golf carts also have them, and it's not like they're going on the highway or even regularly breaking 20 mph.
What? Make your point clear please.
Political discourse is and always has been a dangerous activity, it's always been recognized as such, and the arguments you're deploying to deny this reality are ridiculous.
Even banks and insurance providers disagree with you explicitly as a matter of policy.
All this in the service of denying the courage of a man who actually died doing this dangerous but necessary thing. It all seems very futile.
Being any sort of public figure has been a dangerous activity as a baseline. I don't judge political discourse as being significantly more dangerous than a celebrity. I might buy that it could be somewhat more dangerous, but not orders of magnitude relative to how well the person is known. Again, perhaps that's changing now, but political assassinations had been surprisingly rare in previous decades.
Feel free to present evidence to the contrary.
I gave you a bunch of public, conspicuous and escalating acts of political violence against specifically mere speech and you dismissed it out of hand.
It sounds like nothing short of people getting gunned down like it's the years of lead in very early memory, in your own country, would convince you that politics is dangerous.
The difference between mere public appearance and politics is that there are organized murderous groups that want you out of the picture. Not just nutters. But you conveniently just pack all these in the nutter bundle to avoid having to deal with the fact that there are perfectly sane murderous actors.
Anecdotes are not data. I also came up with a list of random celebrities that have been attacked, but I don't think that would be sufficient to establish a hypothetical counterclaim that being an apolitical celebrity is actually more dangerous than being a political figure. Note I wouldn't actually make that claim, I'm just using it to prove a point about the dangers of relying on the availability heuristic.
While the Years of Lead or the Troubles would definitely qualify to make politics "dangerous", I don't think you'd need to go that far to show danger.
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