Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1981. 'What is this madness that inflicts us?'

This editorial ran March 31, 1981, after John Hinckley shot President Reagan:

The news erupted from Washington yesterday afternoon as a nightmare reborn. A president, visible in a public place, this time only a few blocks from the White House. Secret Service men and police officers in position. All seemingly normal. But then came the crack of gunfire as a gunman's bullets struck the President and three other men. And as the news spread, a shocked, disbelieving America wanted to exclaim: Not again!

President Reagan had escaped assassination by inches, but his injury was serious. The nation's prayers were joined for his complete recovery, as well as for his critically wounded press secretary, James S. Brady, and for the two wounded security agents . . .

Assassination and attempted assassination, done upon the heart of national leadership, carry the special horror of shaking our most revered public institutions. But such tragedies also force upon us the awareness, which many prefer to ignore, that the violence habit has become ingrained in much of our population. And as violence rubs the nation's fabric raw, it endangers us all . . .

Is America somehow ordained by fate to endure more of this crazed terror? Are the strains in our society so acute, and are some individuals poised so near the brink of insanity, that violence is to be an inescapable part of our existence? Such questions have been asked before -- after the murders of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others -- yet the pattern stays with us, dormant for a time, only to re-emerge and scald the conscience of a new generation.

America hopes for its President to be restored to health; and hopes for the recovery of his man, Jim Brady, and the two wounded officers. But shock and sadness are insufficient as responses to this malignant spirit that seems abroad in the land. Somehow the sources of the violent strain in our lives, and the instruments that [it] uses, must be learned, and exposed, and removed.