On March 30, 1981, as President Ronald Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel where he had given a speech to union leaders, the mentally ill son of a wealthy Texas energy executive emerged from the crowd and opened fire on Reagan with a six-shot revolver.
The gunman, John W. Hinckley Jr., 25, was trying to impress Jodie Foster, a child star he had a crush on, when he shot three people and one ricocheting into President Reagan while police and Secret Service agents surrounded Hinckley on the sidewalk in a melee.
Reagan was rushed to the hospital and survived.
Before former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was injured on Saturday, Reagan was just the latest in a string of leading politicians and cultural figures to fall victim to a wave of violence rooted in American discourse stretching back more than 150 years.
According to the Congressional Research Service, there have been at least 15 direct attacks on the US president, president-elect, or presidential candidates, five of which have resulted in deaths.
According to the U.S. Senate Historical Office, the first attempted assassination of a president occurred on January 30, 1835.
That day, a troubled, unemployed painter named Richard Lawrence hid behind columns in the U.S. Capitol with two handguns and ambushed President Andrew Jackson.
The 67-year-old Jackson was attending the funeral at the Capitol when Lawrence approached him, pointing a single-shot Derringer at the president’s heart and pulling the trigger. The gun fired, with a bang and a puff of smoke, but failed to fire.
Jackson, walking stick in hand, lunged at Lawrence, who then pulled a second handgun and fired it, but it also misfired. Bystanders attacked Lawrence, who was later determined to be mentally insane, and rushed Jackson away.
There were subsequent assassination attempts on U.S. presidents, totalling four: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963.
In 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts within one month.
In both cases, acts of violence shook the nation and Americans struggled to understand what had happened.
On September 5, 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm, a member of the Charles Manson cult, tried to shoot Ford outside the California State Capitol in Sacramento, where she was only an arm’s length away, but there was no bullet in the chamber of her gun when she pulled the trigger.
On September 22, 1975, self-described extremist Sarah Jane Moore fired a gun at Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, but missed.
On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at Blair House, where the president was staying in Washington, D.C. One of the assailants and a White House police officer were killed. Truman, who remained in the building, was unharmed.
On February 15, 1933, an assassin nearly killed President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt at a rally in Miami when Giuseppe Zangara, an unemployed bricklayer who said he hated government officials and the rich, shot him five times. Roosevelt was unharmed, but the bullets wounded four people and killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.
On October 14, 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee for a third, nonconsecutive term when he was shot as he left a hotel by John Schrank, a mentally disturbed bar owner from New York City.
The bullet was slowed by a thick copy of the speech he was scheduled to give and a glasses case that Roosevelt was carrying in his pocket. Roosevelt stumbled, but continued speaking that night. The bullet remained in his body for the rest of his life. Schrank died in a psychiatric hospital in 1943.
On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis by escaped prisoner James Earl Ray.
On June 5, presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
Four years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in a Los Angeles hotel during a campaign stop.
Robert Kennedy was shot in the head as he walked near the hotel kitchen where he was giving a speech by a Palestinian Christian, Sirhan Sirhan, who was infuriated by Kennedy’s support for Israel.
Sirhan was given the death sentence, which was later changed to life imprisonment, and his latest parole request was rejected last year.
Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent for president against Trump and Biden, said he had previously requested Secret Service protection but was denied.
The unrest that followed Saturday’s attack on Trump was reminiscent of the May 1972 shooting of George C. Wallace, a segregationist governor of Alabama and presidential candidate.
Wallace was shot while speaking to a crowd of about 1,000 people at the Laurel Shopping Center in northeast Washington, D.C. The assailant, 21-year-old Arthur Herman Bremer from Milwaukee, was said to have acted alone.
Wallace was left partially paralyzed for the rest of his life, and Bremer served 35 years of his sentence and was released in 2007.
