MINNEAPOLIS — As federal authorities continue to investigate an attempted assassination on former President Trump, the country has been thrown into turmoil just four months before a presidential election.
Yet, as author and University at Buffalo history professor Dr. Carole Emberton explains, it's not without precedent.
"It's very shocking and very scary," Emberton said. "This type of political violence is, unfortunately, not new for us. We haven't seen it recently, thank goodness, but history does provide us with some tragic examples of this happening before."
According to a Congressional Research Service paper — updated in late 2009 early in the Obama administration — 15 "direct assaults" have been made throughout history against presidents, president-elects and presidential candidates.
The last sitting president to be shot was Ronald Reagan in 1981, when John Hinckley Jr. opened fire on the president near the Hilton in Washington, D.C. Before that, Gerald Ford, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson were fired at, but not hit, in assassination attempts.
Four presidents have been assassinated in office: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and John F. Kennedy in 1963. Lincoln and JFK are widely known in the American collective memory, while Garfield and McKinley have been somewhat overlooked by the general public.
McKinley's killing at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, however, was a landmark moment for the country because it spurred Congress to authorize the Secret Service specifically for presidential security.
"America was really becoming a key player on the global stage, an imperial power, a world power. The anarchists who were blamed for McKinley's assassination, it was a global movement," Emberton said. "There was really a sense that new measures needed to be taken to ensure the president of the United States was protected and that's one of the driving forces behind making sure there's a dedicated branch of government that is tasked with protecting the president and his family."
The U.S. Secret Service eventually expanded to include former presidents and candidates.
Yet, since the start of the 20th century, three major presidential candidates have been injured or killed in shootings during campaigns.
In 1912, former president Teddy Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee while seeking a return of office through a third-party nomination. U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles in 1968 after winning California's Democratic presidential primary, and during the Democratic primaries four years later, Alabama's segregationist governor George Wallace was paralyzed by a bullet, derailing his campaign.