Even younger political history buffs probably remember John Hinkley. He's the guy who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981 because he thought it would impress a movie star he had a crush on. (Or so he claimed.) He was kept locked up in a psych ward until 2016 when a judge finally released him for some reason. Since then he's been recording music and selling paintings to get by, sort of like Hunter Biden. But this week he went on social media to share a bit of advice with the world in the wake of Donald Trump's shooting in Pennsylvania. He wants us all to choose peace over violence. In other words, you shouldn't go around shooting presidents. Thanks for the tip, Johnny. (NY Post)

John Hinckley, the man who shot and nearly killed President Ronald Reagan in 1981, has asked the world to choose peace over violence after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

“Violence is not the way to go,” Hinckley wrote on X on Wednesday. “Give peace a chance.”

The message comes after Trump was grazed by an assassin’s bullet, and a hero firefighter was killed at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.

I can't tell if Hinckley was actually trying to be serious or if he was intentionally being offensive. My first impulse was to think he was mocking everyone else. A person who very nearly killed a president and eventually did kill James Brady, along with wounding two other men, is not someone who can lecture anyone else on this sort of violence. But then, we can't be entirely sure. After all, the guy literally is a certified lunatic, so who knows what he might be apt to say? Alternately, perhaps he's trying to convince the world that he really did learn his lesson during his incarceration and that he's trying to turn over a new leaf.

This episode is also a reminder that at least in his own way, John Hinkley was something of an unintentionally transformative figure. The public outrage that followed the finding that he was innocent by reason of insanity led the courts to take a fresh look at insanity plea laws and tighten them up. Hinkley was clearly unstable to some degree and his fixation on Jodie Foster was kind of weird but not all that unusual given her growing star power. Yet he was clearly still aware of his surroundings and in touch with reality sufficiently to be able to track the President's schedule in the era before the internet, select an ambush point, and pull off the attack. Was he really all that "crazy?"

Hinkley's actions also spurred a sea change in how we approach presidential security details. Reagan was such a popular and beloved figure that it seemed almost unthinkable that anyone would want to harm him. John Hinkley shattered that illusion permanently. Presidential Secret Service details were beefed up, security perimeters were expanded, and new protocols were put in place to ensure that potentially dangerous maniacs couldn't get close enough to try something like that again. Of course, the events of last week suggest that perhaps we didn't learn those lessons as well as we'd thought. Then again, it's been more than forty years since Hinkley attacked Reagan (if you can believe it), so perhaps we've just forgotten some of what we learned then.

If John Hinkley really wants to do the world a favor, perhaps he could retreat back off of the world stage again and leave us alone. Go back to playing with your finger paints and strumming your guitar. You are never going to be viewed as some sort of noble or heroic figure. You are one of history's villains and that is how you will always be remembered. Delete your social media accounts, nutjob. We already have far more than enough maniacs posting dangerous nonsense.