Trump’s bumpy road back to the White House

Washington, D.C

My local polling station is a Christian Brothers high school set amid football fields and parking lots. On Tuesday a woman who lives on our street was arriving to vote just as I was. She had come from a mandatory ‘active-shooter training session’ at her office. Of course, all shooters are ‘active’. Active shooter is what the TV stations call an armed psychopath during the brief period between the moment he starts gunning people down – say, in a cinema, church, school or office – and the moment he dies in a blaze of police- or self-inflicted gunfire. These episodes don’t happen often, of course, but they make quite an impression on CEOs when they do, and my neighbour is not the first person I know who’s been to a training session about how to deal with them. The firearms experts who ran the session, she said, were military veterans of some sort, and pretty homespun.