Why are leaders usually not threatened by violence?

[Rev. Rye]

Because, like it or not, they have power. Even if you manage to take your vengeance and eliminate any of them, well, they will always find a way to make those people into martyrs.

Case in point:





You left a legacy
Of butchery and treason we
Took eagerly
And thought you'd get applause

But traitors just get jeers and boos
Not visits to their graves
While Lincoln, who got mixed reviews
Beacause of you, John, now gets only raves

In life, Lincoln was the most divisive president in the history of America. It was bad enough that his election prompted seven states to secede from the union before he even took office. And, in his life, the extreme lengths he took to keep the Union together, up to and including suspending Habeas Corpus, not to mention the way he handled slavery (particularly the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves seemingly out of spite, except for those in the border states still in the Union, which left the states in rebellion, who didn't recognise the authority of the Union government anyway, meaning it didn't free anyone) didn't help matters. But then, a mentally ill reactionary actor went to the President's booth and shot him in the back of the head. After that, NOBODY said a bad word against him. To this day, he's invariably considered one of the greatest presidents, if not the greatest ever. A list of Wikipedia's surveys of historical scholars shows that the LOWEST he's ever been in any of these surveys is #3. The majority of them, he's at #1. His only rivals in this department are FDR, Washington, and maybe Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt. And if he survived to 1869, I'm legitimately not sure he'd be that highly regarded.