Trump's second assassination attempt is shocking, but attempts on the lives of presidents aren’t unusual in US history

Former President Donald Trump survived his second assassination attempt On September 15, 2024, an assassination attempt was made that marks the newest chapter in an extended history book. Assassination attempts on presidents, whether successful or not, are quite commonplace in American history.

Since the founding of the country, 45 men have been elected president. And 40% of them have been victims of known assassination attempts. Four presidents – Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley And John F. Kennedy – were murdered.

While Trump and Theodore Roosevelt were each former presidents once they were shot, Ronald Reagan was injured during his term in office, and a possible assassin Reagan's life was almost led to 1981.

Thirteen others – Andrew Jackson, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden – had known plans or failed attempts to finish their lives.

Many of them have been assassinated multiple times, and the general public has probably never been informed of further attacks on them or other presidents.

Presidents symbolize our ideals as Americans. They often act because the physical embodiment of our country, their political party, and its values. When individuals are unhappy with the United States or its policies, some select to precise their opinions in violent ways. Those who decide to assassinate a president inadvertently humanize the very presidents they need to kill.

A typical thread

Every assassination or attempted assassination of a president was carried out with a firearm. With the exception of The two attempted assassinations of Gerald Fordall perpetrators were male.

These include Trump’s two attackers, Men who were once fascinated by but he seems to have turn into disillusioned with some features of recent politics.

The Secret Service stopped an armed man hiding at a Trump golf course in Palm Beach, Florida, on September 15. The Secret Service shot at the one who fled in a automotive before he was arrested and detained.

This happened just two months after Trump was injured at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13 by a young man who tried to kill Trump with a shot to the pinnacle.

Many assassination attempts on presidents seem incomprehensible to everyone except the perpetrator.

A person named Charles Guiteau killed Garfield in 1881 because he wanted to acquire a patronage position in the federal government.

John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln as part of a bigger conspiracy to create chaos and reignite the “Southern cause.” Support of slaveryOn the identical night that Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, his Secretary of State William Seward was attacked but survived.

At the identical time, the conspiracy was for then Vice President Andrew Johnson even be killed by one other man, George Atzerodt, who as a substitute got drunk and threw the knife in a gutter.

Booth and his co-conspirators hoped that the near-simultaneous deaths of those politicians would plunge the Union into chaos and make the succession unclear. Their plan failed, and since Johnson remained alive, the country's clear presidential succession rule remained intact.

A near miss

Half a century later, former President Theodore Roosevelt was shot and killed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1912 while campaigning for a 3rd term.

Although he was shot at almost point blank range, Roosevelt was in some ways saved by his poor eyesight and long-winded in nature. Roosevelt had a 50-page speech in his pocket, in addition to his steel eyeglass case. Both items slowed the bullet down enough in order that it just penetrated his chest, but no deeper than the muscle.

Roosevelt then gave a 90-minute speech before leaving for the hospital.

One of the closest comparisons to Trump's two most up-to-date assassination attempts is in September 1975, when two women attempted to kill President Gerald Ford.

Both Trump and Ford were the targets of assassination attempts inside a brief time frame that attracted an awesome deal of media attention. Both were targeted by individuals with logically unclear motives.

Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme, a former member of the Manson Familya cult known within the Nineteen Seventies, tried to kill Ford so as, she claimed, to avoid wasting California’s redwood trees.

At the time, the Environmental Protection Agency was warning people in regards to the worsening effects of smog on the environment, leading them to imagine that murder was the one method to save the trees. Fromme, dressed all in red, went to Sacramento, where the president was visiting. aimed and shot at him inside a variety of two feet.

Except the gun didn't fire.

Passersby heard a click because she had not loaded a cartridge into the chamber, probably because she didn’t know much about guns. After this primary attempt, the Secret Service intervened. Fromme later claimed that she had not intended to shoot the president.

Seventeen days later, on September 22, Sara Jane Moore shot Ford in San Francisco from about 40 feet away and missed. Her second shot also missed, this time because a passerby, Oliver Sipple, grabbed the gun, causing the shot to miss. Injury to a taxi driver.

Finally Reagan survived an assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr. on March 30, 1981. Hinckley was obsessive about the favored movie Taxi Driver and particularly the character played by actress Jodie Foster.

He believed that if he could impress Foster, she would exit with himAs Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel, Hinckley fired six shots in two seconds. One shot ricocheted off the automotive and hit the president's left side and lung. One of the funnier lines that Reagan would later repeat got here that day when he checked out the doctors preparing for surgery and said: “I just hope you’re a Republican.” A health care provider replied, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”

The best and the worst of us

Throughout history, American presidents and sometimes candidates have been attacked by gunmen and other would-be assailants to precise their dissatisfaction with the federal government. The reasons for these assassins' actions range from easy chaos to delusions that turn the assassin or would-be assassin right into a heroic protagonist.

Presidential assassinations reflect the perfect and worst in people concurrently. The violence itself reveals the worst sides of society, but Americans often appear at their best afterward. As Reagan's surgeons once recognized, politics should never supersede humanity or be valued above an individual's health and safety.