Post-Modern Drunk: A Brief History of Political Violence From People Who Are Cray Cray
The movies and recent history have given us the image of assassins as professionals--highly trained killers with intricate plans that they execute impecably to kill their targets. The conspirators are brilliant and devious, and escape without getting caught. Occasionally they leave a patsy, like Lee Harvey Oswalt, but mostly they disappear in a puff of cigarette smoke, never to be uncovered again.

The truth is, we wouldn't believe the story of most assassins if we saw it in a movie. Not because their plots are so intricately executed, but because most political assassins are the type of crazy that comes off as fake, forced, and over the top in movies. The type of people that the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would say, "Dude, chillax." These are people Jared Loughner is a charter member of.

A Brief History of Political Violence From People Who Are Cray Cray.

Richard Lawrence:
Lawrence is the first person to be noticed making an assassination attempt on a US president--it's possible that previous assassinations had been attempted but failed so dismally that all those involved just retreated sheepishly into the mists of history. Lawrence was a painter and it is suspected that he might have succumbed to insanity due to exposure to paint fumes. Whatever the reason, he decided that the American government owed him a lot of money, which Andrew Jackson was preventing him from receiving. Once the government paid him off, he could then take up his rightful place as the King of England. But not just any king of England. He specifically thought he was Richard III. That's right, the allegedly humpbacked King of England from the War of the Roses.

So Andrew Jackson was preventing him from exchanging his kingdom for a horse, and needed to pay. Lawrence bought two pistols, stalked Jackson to a funeral, and tried to shoot him. Both pistols failed to fire, and Richard Lawrence was beaten repeatedly with a cane by Andrew Jackson and wrestled to the ground by a crowd that included Davy Crockett.

All of what I just wrote is true.

Charles Guiteau:
Guiteau was a high school dropout who joined a utopian commune that believed in free love. The commune promptly decided that some people should have to be charged for love and kicked him out. They nicknamed him Charles Gitout. He left and tried to start a newspaper called the The Daily Theocrat. The market for theocracy being what it was, the newspaper failed. He then tried to repeatedly sue the founder of the utopian commune he'd been kicked out of, only to then publish a book almost entirely plagiarized from that founder's writings.

Then he got into politics. He wrote a speech in support of Ulysses S. Grant for the 1880 presidential campaign. When Grant lost the nomination to James Garfield, Guiteau changed all instances of "Grant" in the speech to "Garfield," and nothing else. He gave this speech twice, and passed around copies at a couple of gatherings. Garfield won the election, and Guiteau believed that his support was pivotal, and, as such, he should be the Ambassador to either Vienna or Paris. No one agreed with him, and although he kept showing up at the White House to apply for the job, he was eventually personally told never to return by the Secretary of State.

Guiteau borrowed $15 and bought a gun with it. He wanted one with ivory handles, because he wanted it to look nice in the museum, but he couldn't afford it. He then used it to shoot Garfield twice in the back in a train station. Garfield probably would have survived if his doctors hadn't been criminally incompetent, using dirty instruments and unsterilized hands to probe around the wound, accidentally puncturing his liver. Alexander Graham Bell invented an early metal detector to try to find the bullet, but no one thought to move him to a bed without a metal frame before trying it out on him. Eventually, they moved Garfield to the Jersey Shore to recover. He died shortly after arriving, which seemed the only sensible response.

Guiteau stayed around after the shooting and let them arrest, and then hang, him.

John Flammang Schrank:
The assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt as he was running for a third term as president in 1912 is a story that is told a lot from one angle, because it demonstrates that Teddy Roosevelt was the Chuck Norris of the presidency. Roosevelt was shot right before giving his speech. After coughing a couple of times without coughing blood, Teddy determined that the bullet, slowed by the 50 page speech he was preparing to give, hadn't penetrated through to his lung, so he proceeded to give the entirety of his 90 minute speech to the assembled audience. This much is normally mentioned. What's not mentioned much is his would-be assassin: John Flammang Schrank.

You may think the most enjoyable thing about John Flammang Schrank is his name. Especially that middle name. You just want to shout it out: John Flammang Schrank. But that's not all! The issue that so motivated Schrank--one that should give Mayor Bloomberg pause--was that Roosevelt was running for a third term as president. George Washington had established the precedent that no president would serve more than two terms, but it was on the honor system; it wouldn't be codified into law until 1947.

Anyway, Schrank was told by the ghost of former President William McKinley that he should kill Roosevelt for his audacity. As we all know, anything the ghost of McKinley--himself assassinated by an anarchist, elevating Roosevelt to the presidency--tells you, you should do. Schrank himself said he wasn't trying to kill "the citizen Roosevelt," but "Roosevelt the third termer." Flammang!

John Hinckley, Jr.
He liked Jodie Foster. He didn't know how to impress her. He considered hijacking an airplane, or committing suicide. Instead, he tried to kill Carter, failed, and then tried to kill Reagan, only managing to injure Reagan with a ricochet. This is universally considered to be a bad way to meet women.

Francisco Martin Duran.
This guy went to the front of the White House, pulled out a cheap Chinese version of an AK-47, and sprayed the front of the White House with bullets because one of the men playing in the yard looked like it might be Bill Clinton. He claimed that he was trying to destroy a "mist" connected by an umbilical cord to an alien being in the mountains of Colorado. The mist was controlling the White House, according to him. And what better way to destroy mist than automatic weapons fire?

This was less than two months after a guy crashed a Cessna into the White House--just for fame's sake, though, not out of any desire to kill Clinton. Clinton was staying in Blair House at the time--the place Presidents stay at when the White House is under construction--which is where Truman was staying when two incompetent Puerto Ricans completely failed to kill him back in 1950, despite getting within 30 feet of him (Truman heard gunfire, and ventured out onto the balcony to see what was going on, because after you've nuked multiple cities, what's a handgun to you?).

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