Latest in a series of violent acts

Press, 1 April 1981, Page 24

Latest in a series of violent acts

Four Presidents of the United States --•'Abraham Lincoln. James Garfield, William McKinley and John Kennedy — have been shot dead by assassins. .

Lincoln, who led the country . during the Civil War between „t.he northern .. and southern states, was shot in a Washington theatre in 1865 by a partisan of the defeated Sbuth, John Wilkes Booth. ; Garfield held office for only four months in 1881 before he was shot in a Washington railway station by Charles Guiteau, who was angry because he had failed to get a government job. McKinley, who led the country during the Spanish-Ameri-can War, was serving his second term when he was shot by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, in Buffalo, New’York, in 1910. Kennedy was shot while riding in a' motorcade through Dallas. Texas, in . November. 1963. An official commission concluded that. Lee Harvey Oswald, who was shot dead by., a Dallas resident. Jack Ruby, ■in a police station - 24 hours later, was the killer and acted,, alone. - . - '.

From NZPA, Washington

The shooting of President Reagan was the latest in a series of acts of violence, beginning with President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, which have traumatised modern American society. John Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy” was campaigning for the”.presidency in 1968 when he was shot-dead in a Los Angeles hotel. President Harry Truman escaped unscathed when Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill him in 1950; and Franklin Roosevelt also escaped an asassination attempt in. 1933 between his election victory and his inauguration as Presidnet. In 1975, President Gerald Ford was the target of two separate attempts .to shoot him, both by women in Californian cities. He was unhurt both limes. Ex-governor George Wallace of Alabama was shot and paralysed, like Robert Kennedy, while campaigning for the presidency. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King was murdered too and many campaigners for black power have also died by the gun. The most

recent notable murder victim in-the United States was former Beatle, John Lennon, shot and killed in New York last December.

These killings have led to a mounting campaign for laws to limit the right of Americans to carry guns. President Reagan himself has opposed this campaign. coming as he does from California, one of the western states where there is a powerful lobby which says that the right tb carry a gun is inherently guaranteed to Americans in the Constitution. When Mi" Reagan won the presidency last November he fell heir to what many Americans consider a 140-year-old jinx: since 1849, every presidential candidate elected in a year ending in zero has died in office. They include all four of the assassination victims, plus three who died of natural causes. William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, died'of pneumonia after a month in office; Warren Harding, elected in 1920, died in 1923; Franklin .Roosevelt, elected for his third term in 1940, died in 1945, early in his. fourth term.