In 200-plus years there have only been eight US Ambassadors who have been killed while in office, six in armed attacks and two in plane crashes. Mark Lippert, America’s Ambassador to South Korea, won’t be the ninth, thankfully. But he was the victim of a knife attack yesterday.

One doesn’t ordinarily think of South Korea as a dangerous place for American diplomats, but the guy who knifed Lippert, Kim Ki-jong, is seemingly “well-known among police and activists as one of a hard-core group of protesters willing to use violence to highlight their causes.”

Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said it was the first time a foreign ambassador stationed in modern South Korea had been injured in a violent attack.

However, the Japanese ambassador narrowly escaped injury in 2010 when Kim threw a piece of concrete at him, according to police. Kim, who was protesting Japan’s claim to small disputed islands that are occupied by South Korea, hit the ambassador’s secretary instead, media reports said, and was sentenced to a three-year suspended prison term over the attack.

I can hear the NRA now. “If he and his security detail had had knives or concrete blocks he’d never have gotten hurt!”