Past assassination attempts led to US gun reform. But not this time

In the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, the calls for stricter gun regulation came quickly. Senator Thomas Dodd proposed new legislation five days after the president’s death.

Almost two decades later, the 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan prompted swift demands for action, including restrictions on handguns.

And though in both instances it would take years for lawmakers to move forward, both tragedies led to meaningful reform: bans on mail-order gun sales, restrictions on who can purchase weapons and federal background checks for all gun purchases.

Political violence has long shaped the US gun control movement, but it appears little will change from this week.

After the attempt on Donald Trump’s life over the weekend, outcry over the easy access to guns in US has been relatively muted. There are no Republicans calling for tougher laws. There’s no national conversation about the toll of gun violence on American life.

The biggest movements for gun control in US history can be traced to specific assassinations, said Andrew McKevitt, a history professor at Louisiana Tech University and the author of Gun Country, which looks at America’s relationship with firearms.

“The calls for those things came in the immediate aftermath,” McKevitt said. “These are both kind of foundational moments for gun control in the United States and yet we haven’t seen anything in that regard in the last week.”

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After Kennedy’s death, Dodd urged action. It would take five years, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, but in 1968 lawmakers passed the Gun Control Act, banning mail-order gun sales and restricting who can purchase weapons.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan was seriously injured in an assassination attempt alongside his press secretary, James Brady, who was shot in the head, as well as a Secret Service agent and police officer. In the following years, Brady and his wife, Sarah, became advocates for gun violence prevention and joined a non-profit that was eventually renamed in honor of the couple.

They pulled in the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to champion gun safety legislation, said Christian Heyne, the chief officer of policy and programs at Brady, the organization. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which passed under Bill Clinton in 1993, was named for James.

“It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t overnight. They had a series of votes over a series of years and not all of them were successful, but they were persistent,” Heyne said.

In more recent years, as the US became plagued by increasingly horrifying mass shootings, the gun violence prevention movement has grown significantly, but progress at the federal level has been stymied. After the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, efforts by Democrats to pass new gun legislation, including a renewal of the assault weapons ban, were blocked by Republicans.

The school shooting in Parkland, Florida, sparked a major youth movement and massive demonstrations across the US and renewed hope that Congress would take meaningful action. It did not, and instead, the National Rifle Association (NRA) said schools should improve safety and that teachers should be armed.

The cultural and legal landscape has changed dramatically in the decades since the attacks on Kennedy and Reagan, McKevitt said, pointing to the 2004 expiration of a federal ban on assault weapons, which opened the floodgates for a market for the firearms and occurred as TV news showed American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan carrying similar weapons.

US gun culture underwent rapid militarization, he said, and the industry aggressively marketed the expensive AR-15 and swiftly expanded. The “gasoline on the fire” was the election of Barack Obama, who the right portrayed as “coming for your guns”, McKevitt added.

At the heart of the movement is the NRA, the powerful lobbying group that spent $31m to elect Trump in 2016. The NRA developed into what was for years a virtually unstoppable political force that could make or break the careers of Republican politicians.

The group made guns a core of US culture wars and successfully pushed the narrative that “it takes a good guy with a gun” to “stop a bad guy with a gun”.

The gun rights movement was able to achieve major legal victories, McKevitt said, including “stand your ground” laws and open carry legislation.

Meanwhile, during the pandemic, Americans bought guns at record rates.

“We’re living in an era where the gun rights movement won. The gun rights movement has had tremendous, dramatic, triumphant success over the last 40 years,” McKevitt said. “These legal triumphs, these political triumphs, have remade the landscape of guns in America.

“And here we came mere inches from America’s rifle taking the life of the president who is the sort of great icon of the gun industry,” McKevitt said.

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McKevitt said Republicans were likely to remain resistant of any talk of gun safety laws, no matter the victim. And that Democrats were unlikely to want to push such a proposal in an election year.

Heyne, whose mother died in a shooting, said he hoped the shooting in Pennsylvania would inspire some action.

“President Trump now is a survivor of gun violence and I hope part of the process of what comes next is a real sincere thought about what it is that can prevent other people from experiencing what he’s experienced.”

Still, he is frustrated by the lack of a national conversation around gun violence.

“There is a dangerous normalization of gun violence in this country. We’re not having robust calls to action so we can prevent the next national tragedy like this. Until we’re willing to do something it almost certainly will happen again,” he said.

“This assassination attempt was enabled by easy access to a military-style rifle and it was used precisely as it was designed,” he said.