More than 20,000 Americans are shot to death every year

A screen writer could not have scripted it better. A mild spring day in Washington with a misty rain enveloping newly-bloomed cherry blossoms along the Potomac's tidal basin. A newly-elected President - a veteran of 54 Hollywood movies - well-pomaded and spry for his advancing years emerges smiling and waving from a meeting at the Washington Hilton Hotel.He is surrounded by Secret Service agents as he walks to his car a few steps away. He turns to the cameras for a last wave. Then, bedlam. Shots. Screams. People duck for cover. The presidential smile turns briefly into a grimace seen by millions across the world as he is rudely shoved into his bullet-proof car by his bodyguard.The limousine speeds to the nearest hospital. The President thinks he's cracked a rib and turns to his bodyguard and says in jest: "You son of a bitch, you pushed me too hard." The weather-beaten thespian of yesteryear walks into the hospital still in a jovial mood. As he is being wheeled into the operating room he sees his wife, the First Lady, and quips: "Honey, I forgot to duck." And just before he goes under at the operating table he ribs his doctors "Thank God, you're Republicans. Now I know I'm in safe hands." Late that evening the operation is proclaimed a success. The battle-scarred hero of many a movie will, in real life, recover as completely as he did from his screen wounds.This happy-ending scenario - or the lighter side of an assassination attempt on a US President - conveyed repeatedly by radio and television reporters in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, cloaked the sanguinary spectacle in a shroud of eerie unreality. It was a television story, live and in vivid colour, replete with quotable quotes, the sense of well-being and fantasy that the all-pervasive medium conveys. News cameramen had held their hands steady and unflinchingly filmed the entire scene from start to finish, beginning with the "establishment" shot of the President emerging from the hotel and ending with a zoom on his car speeding away to some unknown destination.Serious Injury: The gory details and close-ups would come later. Press Secretary Jim Brady spread eagled face down on a grimy sidewalk, blood gushing from a bullet wound in his head. Reagan, shot in the lung, was saved from possible death by the quick-wittedness of the same bodyguard who shoved him into the car when the shooting started. The presidential limousine was originally headed for the White House because nobody suspected the seriousness of Reagan's injury. In the car Reagan began to cough up bright foamy blood. The bodyguard suspected a lung wound and quickly ordered the chauffeur to change course and head for the nearest hospital. By the time they arrived there Reagan had lost more than half of his blood.Reagan as he is hit by the bullet: Each subsequent attempt leaves the country in the throes of hopelessnessReagan is now recovering as are Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a policeman who were wounded during the fusillade of six bullets fired by the gunman from a USD 50, .22 calibre pistol. But America as a nation was also deeply wounded. "What in hell are we?" asked Tom Davis, a local policeman. "Are we just a bunch of wild men who think we can solve any problem, personal or political, with a gun? Is this ingrained in us because of our Wild West tradition? It makes me puke." "I feel drained, really drained," a government clerk said. "There was a sick feeling in my stomach. My God, I said, don't tell me we're going through this again."The recurring sense of deja vu was all-encompassing. Reagan, the 40th President has become the 14th target of attempted or actual assassinations of Presidents and presidential candidates. Each subsequent attempt leaves the country in the throes of hopelessness, as characterised by this sarcastic headline in a newspaper: "Ho hum, another attempt on the life of a President". The debates, the sociological soul-searehing, the political and psychological analysis, the detailed 'This-Is-Your-Life' portraits of assassins, the historical parallels begin anew. There are no fresh words. The stories of past assassins Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Sirhan, Sara Jane Moore (who tried to assassinate President Ford) are pulled out of newspaper morgues to be bandied about before a tired, mentally weary public that has seen and heard them all before. The Left attributes the shootings and killings to capitalist decadence while the Right screams for law and order and public hangings.Savage Killings: But the mayhem goes on, John Lennon, the superstar, Dr Michael Halberstam, an affable surgeon and writer. There were four killings in Washington in the week that Lennon and Halberstam were gunned down. Washington, the nation's capital seemed to some observers to have become a veritable Dodge City in need of a Marshal Dillon to patrol it. More than 20,000 Americans are shot to death every year. In Washington alone one person is shot every fifty minutes. Martin Garcia, 24, a student shot in the stomach by four strangers. The debates, the sociological soul-searching, the political and psychological analysis, the detailed This is Your-Life' portraits of assassins, the historical parallels begin a new. There are no fresh words. Stanley Hall, 35, shot in the stomach while standing on a downtown street corner Carl Lane, 64, haberdasher, shot in the head as he was leaving his store. Michael Ethridge, 31, killed as he was attempting to prevent someone from harming his girl friend. William Sitko, 29, painter, killed during a gunfight in a Washington suburb Irene Yaskovitch, 48, community leader, shot by snipers while sitting at a table inside her home. Randy Moskowitz, 16, killed at high-school. These are some of the 175 men, women and children shot and killed in Washington in 1980.Most of the dead named above attracted scant attention but for brief obituaries in local papers. But the killings of Lennon, Halber stam and the attempt on Reagan's life have again sparked the on-again-off-again debate on gun-control in this country. Americans are armed to the teeth. There are about 60 million hand-guns now in circulation. And most guns involved in murders are what are known as 'Saturday night specials'-cheap low-calibre pistols that can be purchased over-the-counter without a license in most parts of America.The powerful gun lobby, cheerled by the National Rifle Association has so far throttled every organised attempt to enact gun-control legislation. Powerful Congressmen opposed to gun proliferation have gone down in ignominous defeat, thanks to the gun lobby which proclaims: "People kill people, guns don't" and its members continuously fan the tires of the mythology of rugged American individualism which, carried to its logical extreme, condones taking the law into one's own hands. The gun-control activists on the other side argue that most murders are committed with easily available hand-guns purchased shortly before the crime. This was certainly true in the case of John Warnock Hinckley, the man arrested for the attempted assassination of Reagan. He had purchased his weapon a few days earlier in a pawn-shop in Dallas.The post-mortems inevitably encompass a debate on whether America is a politically violent society. The political 'whodunit' buffs float theories about murder plots hatched by organised crime, the CIA, and then appropriate every clue for their hypotheses. While there still remain many unanswered questions about the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, there seems little evidence to support a pattern of organised politically-linked killings. As writer Henry Fairlie put it: "Political violence is most truly disturbing when it is institutionalised in the political life of a country. The simple fact is that political violence in the United States has never produced a Communist Party, a National Socialist Party, a Fascist Party a Falangist Party which has seriously sought or held power. Political violence here has never ended in Auschwitz or a Gulag Archipelago. What is disturbing about it here is its very lack of institutionalisation. It is because it does not reduce the political life of the country to barbarity, it is because it does not tear at the fabric of society, that it is so conspicuous and seems so inexplicable and threatening a phenomenon. If it were class war, revolution, or religious fanaticism, or merciless colonels, or nationalism, it would be comprehensible."The protection of presidents then boils down to finely honed techniques of Secret Service manoeuvres and of keeping FBI tabs on potential assassins. The Secret Service and FBI keep a list of potential killers based on profiles drawn from years of experience. But as Reagan's case shows, none of this worked. The profile of the typical would-be presidential assassin fits Hinckley like a glove and yet Hinckley was never under any suspicion until the moment he unloaded his revolver. According to the profile, presidential assailants are usually white males of slim build, cannot make friends or form lasting relations with women, are unable to work steadily, use hand-guns, and choose a moment when the President appears among crowds for the assassination attempt.Hinckley, the son of a millionaire oil baron, was a loner, unable to keep a job, make any friends, with a secret obsessive love for actress Jody Foster for whom he left a note saying he would shoot the President in order to gain her recognition. In many ways he epitomised the anomie and rootlessness in American society where the only way to establish one's identity is to violently erase somebody else's, or the way into a woman's heart lies in reliving the primeval male hunting role of bringing in the biggest trophy. Hinckley had managed to enter an area reserved for the press. The Secret Service is still taking heat over how Hinckley managed to sneak in there. There are suggestions galore for tighter security for the President but as one Secret Service agent said: "We can only make the President as secure as he wants to be." If a President - like Reagan - likes mingling with crowds and the White House encourages this for publicity purposes he will always be at risk. Disrupted System: Hinckley's bullets not only show up the continuing vulnerability of Presidents to assassins but also disrupt the supposedly fool-proof military chain of command. Had the Soviets decided to fire nuclear missiles at the US soon after Reagan was shot, the US would not have been able to respond. A military attache carrying a black box is assigned to follow the President at all times. Inside the black box are secret codes to unlock and trigger the US nuclear arsenal. It also has a private phone for the President to send emergency instructions to the Pentagon. In the fracas following the shooting, the military attache, Jose Muratti, fell to the ground. When he got on to his feet again the presidential limousine was already speeding away. Muratti - with the key to America's nuclear weapons strapped to his wrist - was supposed to be at the President's side. But the attache had no idea whether the President had been wounded or where he was headed until he found another Secret Service car.At the White House and the Pentagon all hell broke loose. Vice-President Bush, who would legally take over as commander-in-chief of the military in the event of President Reagan's incapacitation did not learn of the shooting for nearly 20 minutes. There was literally no one in charge in case a vital nuclear decision had to be made. The defence secretary is the third in command. But in the ensuing pandemonium secretary of state Alexander Haig made an unprecedented mini-power grab and declared that he was "in charge at the White House". The USD 50,.22 pistol had completely disrupted a system fine-tuned and rehearsed over the years.Even as the White House settles down to business as usual, and the Secret Service mulls over greater security procedures, the debates on violence and politics and the health of American society are petering out. At Princeton University the students are playing a new game called "assassinations" - a kind of chess game featuring a President, Secret Service, and a potential assassin who must be spotted and tagged. And in the weeks since the attempt on the life of the American President the Secret Service and FBI have reported 300 calls and letters from anonymous people threatening to assassinate Reagan or Bush.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 22, 2013 11:49 IST--- ENDS ---

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More than 20,000 Americans are shot to death every year

A newly-elected President - a veteran of 54 Hollywood movies - well-pomaded and spry for his advancing years emerges smiling and waving from a meeting at the Washington Hilton Hotel.

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