Does Assassination Target Pacifists?

I recently came across this comic strip from Zen Pencils that quoted George Carlin as saying that the people who were killed by assassins were the ones who told us to live together in harmony and try to love each other.  Immediately I wondered whether the observed relationship actually held up.

The cartoon shows nine men who were assassinated.  The first three were Jesus, Gandhi and Lincoln.  Of these Jesus was executed, not assassinated, as near as we can tell for armed insurrection against the Roman Empire.  The gospel accounts state that the Romans placed a sign saying king of the Jews on the cross.  A statement by Jesus that he was such would be forbidden by the Romans as he would require approval of the Senate for that position.  The gospel accounts also state that his disciples had two swords.  It is doubtful that the Romans considered him a serious threat.  Rather his execution seems to be a rather cruel way of mocking the Jews.

Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer, who was upset about the civil war.  Whatever one might say about the justice of the conflict, it killed over 600,000.  With that many deaths there is sure to be some resentment.

The assassinations are not a representative sample of all those who were assassinated.  Four presidents have been deliberately killed while in office, but only two appear in the cartoon.  James Garfield and William McKinley are not listed.  I believe that the pattern here is that people who are well known today are listed.

Since only four U.S. presidents have been assassinated, it is difficult to draw objective conclusions from this data.  The fact that the president who served during the bloodiest war in U.S. history was killed is suggestive of a positive relationship between war and assassination, which would seem to state the exact opposite of what George Carlin was saying.  Casualties during the  civil war are almost half of all deaths due to war in the U.S.  In addition to this we have McKinley assassinated during the Philippine-American war and Kennedy during the Vietnam war.  It is quite suggestive that three quarters of the assassinations of U.S. presidents have occurred at the same time as the ten largest conflicts in U.S. history.  However, this is a rather small sample on which to draw conclusions.

In order to objectively test this idea on U.S. presidents, we would need to include assassination attempts as well as successful assassinations.  We have military casualties here and presidential assassinations here.  In the nineteenth century we have more successful assassinations than unsuccessful attempts.  There was one attempt on Andrew Jackson and one or two on Lincoln in addition to the successful attempts.  If we take the ten largest wars waged by the U.S., we were one of these for about 61 of the 220 years that we have had a president. Hence one successful assassination is about what we would expect if war and assassination are unrelated.  What we see are three.  In addition to the civil war,   We should also expect seven unsuccessful attempts during these major wars under the same assumption.  What we see is fourteen, which is twice as many.

It may well be that many good leaders were killed by assassins.  Indeed, it is the case that assassinations tend to be of people who are famous.  When someone who isn't famous is killed, that is only murder.  Assassinations of those who enjoy a good reputation tend to shock and surprise us.  Those who struggled for peace, or at least have  reputation for doing so, surprise people even more.  However, it seems likely that waging war tends to increase the odds of a president being assassinated rather than decrease it.  This is understandable