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A Short History of Attacks on US Presidents, Candidates

 

 

 

 

 

 

Officials are investigating how a gunman was able to fire several shots at former President Donald Trump during a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.

 

Trump said one bullet struck his right ear. One person at the gathering was killed in the attack. Two others were wounded and remain hospitalized.

 

Officials say the gunman was 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Security shot and killed Crooks who was on top of a nearby building.

 

Trump is expected to receive the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week.

 

Political violence, like the attack against Trump, is considered rare in the United States. But Saturday’s attempted political killing, or assassination, and history show that presidents and presidential candidates can be the targets of dangerous or deadly attacks.

 

Here are some attacks listed by the Associated Press:

 

Abraham Lincoln

 

Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president and the first to be killed in office. John Wilkes Booth, an actor, shot Lincoln in the head while he sat with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, as they watched a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

 

Lincoln was taken to a nearby house where he died of his wound the next morning. The assassination took place on April 14, 1865 — days after the South’s surrender ending the U.S. Civil War.

 

Booth was killed on April 26 near Bowling Green, Virginia.

 

James Garfield

 

James Garfield was the second president to be assassinated.

 

Charles Guiteau shot Garfield as he walked through a train station in Washington on July 2, 1881.

 

Efforts to find the bullet in Garfield’s chest were unsuccessful. Garfield was moved to the New Jersey coast where he died on September 6 after only six months in office. Guiteau was tried, found guilty and ｅxecuted in June 1882.

 

William McKinley

 

William McKinley, the 25th president, was shot twice in the chest after giving a speech in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901. Although doctors expected him to recover, a gangrene infection set in. He died on September 14.

 

Twenty-eight-year-old Leon Czolgosz admitted to the shooting. He was tried, found guilty, and electrocuted in October of the same year.

 

John F. Kennedy

 

 

 

 

The 35th president, John F. Kennedy, was shot in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, while traveling in an open car. He died soon afterward at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

 

Police soon arrested Lee Harvey Oswald after finding evidence in a nearby building, the Texas School Book Depository.

 

Two days later, Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, shot Oswald who died. The shooting took place as Oswald was being taken from police headquarters in Dallas in front of television cameras.

 

There have been several other attacks on presidents and presidential candidates. Here is a short list:

 

Theodore Roosevelt

 

Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, was shot in Milwaukee in 1912 while campaigning as a third-party candidate. Roosevelt was seeking a third term. Folded papers and a metal container apparently slowed the bullet, and he was not seriously hurt.

 

His would-be assassin was arrested and spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.

 

Gerald Ford

 

Gerald Ford served as the nation’s 38th president. He faced two attempted assassinations within weeks in 1975. The first was by a follower of Charles Manson, Lynette Fromme. She pushed through a crowd in Sacramento, California, but did not fire her weapon. Fromme was sentenced to prison and released in 2009.

 

Seventeen days later another woman, Sara Jane Moore, fired at Ford and missed in San Francisco. She was released from prison in 2007.

 

Ronald Reagan

 

 

The 40th president, Ronald Reagan, was walking to his car after a speech in Washington when he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr.

 

Reagan recovered from the March 1981 shooting. Three others were shot including his Press Secretary James Brady. Brady would be partially paralyzed for the rest of his life.

 

Hinckley was arrested. A jury found him not guilty because he was mentally sick. He was sent to a mental hospital instead. Hinckley was released in 2022 after a judge said he was “no longer a danger to himself or others.”

 

Robert Kennedy

 

 

 

Robert Kennedy, brother of John Kennedy and a senator from New York, was seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in June 1968. He had just won the Democratic primary election in California. After a victory speech at a hotel in Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed Kennedy and wounded five other people.

 

Sirhan was found guilty and was sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life in prison where he remains.

 

George Wallace

 

Alabama Governor George Wallace was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination when he was shot during a campaign stop in Maryland in 1972. The shooting left him paralyzed from the waist down.

 

Arthur Bremer was convicted in the shooting and sentenced to prison. He was released in 2007.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Words in This Story

assassination –n. the killing of a politically important person or officeholder

commuted to –v. (legal) to exchange a more severe punishment for one that is less severe

paralyzed –adj. having lost the use of a limb because of disease or injury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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