The day President Reagan was shot

 

On Monday, March 27, 2023, a shooter got into a Christian school in Nashville, TN. The shooter killed three children and three adults before being killed by responding police. The usual tug of war has been going on between the Rethuglicans, who want to continue loosening gun control laws, and Democrats, who want to at least ban automatic weapons. People who have survived school shootings, parents, and other reasonably minded folk march, contact their legislators, and speak out against school shootings/mass shootings which just continue to occur more frequently.

Nothing will get done this time either.

Nothing will get done until the children of the Rethuglican legislators are shot up.  It’s inevitable such a thing could happen. Violent people have already begun attacking legislators and their families.

I get a newsletter called This Day in History. On Thursday, I was reminded that President Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington D.C. on March 30, 1981. He’d only taken office in January. He was at the Washington Hilton for a meeting. He had his entire entourage with him as he exited the hotel and headed toward his limo.

There were people standing by, watching. I suppose the Secret Service had asked them to stay in place. Nevertheless, a young man came forward, his gun came up and he started shooting. The agent closest to President Reagan grabbed him and literally shoved him into the limo. Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, was down and gravely wounded. Another Secret Service agent and a D.C. policeman were also wounded.

The other agents grabbed the shooter and pushed him up against the wall, disarming him. The young man’s name was John Hinckley. If ever a shooter was disturbed, it was Mr. Hinckley.  He’d seen the movie Taxi Driver, starring Robert DeNiro. Co-starring was Jodie Foster, then a young teenager. She was playing a hooker the taxi driver apparently wanted to rescue. For some reason, the taxi driver decided shooting a politician was the way to do it.

Well, Hinckley watched this movie over and over and over. He was entranced by Jodie Foster. In 1981, she was just beginning college. Hinckley got it into his head that he could impress and maybe woo Foster if he acted out the role of the taxi driver. Why shoot just any old politician? Why not go for the President?

It turned out that President Reagan had been wounded too. The bullet collapsed one lung and just missed his heart. Still, he kept his sense of humor, telling the doctors he hoped they were all Republicans. And when his wife came in to see him after his surgery, he said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

I remember it very well. I was in shock. How could the President, surrounded by the Secret Service and police, get shot on a public street in Washington, D.C.?  Did the President get thoughts and prayers from his party in Congress?  I don’t remember that part.

I do remember that James Brady, the Press Secretary, had a severe brain injury and was never the same. He and his wife wanted a gun bill passed but, of course, there was resistance from the Republican party. The Bradys and other safe-gun-law activists worked on legislators to pass a bill that would…gasp! Require background checks and a waiting period.

The Brady bill was first introduced in Congress in 1987. President Reagan had recovered from his gunshot wound and so did the Secret Service agent and DC policeman. James Brady did not, not fully. Again, he was never the same and needed intensive therapy to improve to the point at which he was.

The bill didn’t pass the first time, nor the second, nor the third. On and on it went until Rep. Chuck Schumer introduced it for the last time in 1993. Who even remembered what happened in 1981, right?  James Brady who? But this time it finally passed.

It didn’t go far enough.

In 1994, somehow legislation got through that banned automatic weapons, and President Clinton signed it into effect. Unfortunately, the ban was for ten years only. Did it help much? Results were mixed and the ban lapsed in 2014.

I remember Columbine. That was another unheard-of event. Two kids shot up their classmates and teachers. How was that possible? Sandy Hook was heartbreaking. Among those killed were too many babies, just six or seven years old. Surely something would be done. Thoughts and prayers, that was it.

It feels like every time I turn around, there is a new school shooting or a mass shooting.  Every time, I feel sick at heart. I know nothing will be done. Rethuglicans will offer their useless and hypocritical “thoughts and prayers” but that’s all.

Why are these legislators so willing to allow children to be slaughtered like that? It’s because they are controlled by the National Rifle Association. There are lists of legislators and the obscene amounts of money they receive from the NRA.

What can I do but vote them out? However, I don’t live in a state that puts guns ahead of children. It’s up to the voters there, the grandparents, parents, and Gen Z kids who need to go to the polls and vote out those legislators. They must stop voting against their own best interests, but that means they need to wake the fuck up.

I’ve written before about my “I didn’t think this would ever happen to me day”. That was December 13, 1972. A custodian went berserk, pulled out a machete, stabbed a security guard, and took a hostage. He held the hostage in his office, which was right next to my classroom. Anyway, now when there’s a school shooting, I always remember lying on the cold floor while the crisis played out. I also have wondered: what if that custodian had had a gun instead of a machete? He began his rampage in our crowded cafeteria.   How many people could he have potentially killed?