Trump Shooting: Tracing the History of Presidential Attacks

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump, who narrowly escaped death when a bullet grazed his right ear while he was speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, highlights the danger of those seeking votes in a country whose constitution guarantees citizens the right to bear arms.

Abraham Lincoln’s killing in 1865 and that of John F. Kennedy in 1963 are key moments in the history of the United States. James Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901) are less remembered, but their deaths nonetheless rocked the nation at the time.

Leon F. Czolgosz, a twenty-eight-year-old Detroit resident of Polish descent and an unemployed mill worker with anarchist beliefs, shot President McKinley at close range in 1901. Following McKinley's assassination, the U.S. Secret Service was assigned the responsibility of providing full-time protection to presidents.

In 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt was hit in the chest by a .38-calibre bullet as he was campaigning to regain the White House. But most of the impact of the bullet was absorbed by objects in the chest pocket of Roosevelt’s jacket. Even though he had been shot, Roosevelt went on to make a campaign speech with the bullet still in his chest.

In 1933, a gunman fired five shots at the car of then President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt wasn’t hit but the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was speaking to Roosevelt after the newly elected president had made some brief remarks to the public, was injured and died 19 days later.

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. He was shot by a sniper, with the fatal bullet striking him in the head. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Kennedy was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at Parkland Memorial Hospital, marking a tragic and pivotal moment in American history.

Presidential candidates have not been exempt from assassination attempts, including most notably Senator Robert F. Kennedy killed in 1968 and George Wallace shot and left paralysed in 1972.

In September of 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two separate assassination attempts — both by women. The first came on Sept. 5 when Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, a follower of cult leader Charles Manson, tried to shoot Ford as he was walking through a park in Sacramento, Calif., but her gun misfired and didn’t go off. On Sept. 22, Sara Jane Moore, a woman with ties to left-wing radical groups, got one shot off at Ford as he left a hotel in San Francisco but it missed the president.

The last American president to be shot was Ronald Reagan, who was seriously wounded and required emergency surgery in 1981. Reagan was leaving a Washington hotel after giving a speech when gunman John Hinckley Jr. fired shots from a .22-calibre pistol. One of the bullets ricocheted off the president’s limousine and hit him under the left armpit. Reagan spent 12 days in hospital before returning to the White House.