It's nothing, simply ze crazie man try of shoot Monsieur Le President!

So with all of France’s wonderful gun control laws, a mentally deranged neo-Nazi hooligan well known to the police has no trouble at all getting a .22-caliber rifle, bringing it to the annual Bastille Day parade and nearly blowing away the President? Mais non, ce n’est pas possible! But how can that be?

And does it strike anyone as odd that Chirac’s security didn’t even notice that a shoot was taken from just 30-40 meters away? Those in the parade were completely unaware. Public spectators jumped on the gunman and held him until the police arrived.

Actually, I kinda like the typically French ho-hum reaction to the attempted assassination of their President. They didn’t interrupt the parade, Chirac didn’t change a thing in his schedule, and his reaction to the news that someone took a shot at him was, “Oh, really?” RFI, the French radio news, of course led with the event but quickly passed to other, unrelated stories.