Last week a United States District Court Judge ordered that John Hinckley Jr. could be released from confinement from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. because he was no longer dangerously mentally ill. Hinckley will be allowed to live with his mother in Williamsburg, Va. with restrictions.
On March 30, 1981, thirty-five years ago, Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan outside a hotel in the nation’s capital. The President, a Secret Service Agent and a Washington, D.C. police officer received gunshot wounds from which they recovered. Presidential Press Secretary, James Brady, was gravely wounded in the head and suffered severe brain damage.
Hinckley had bought his .22 caliber Rohm RG-14 revolver at a Dallas, Texas pawn shop using an alias, a false address and an expired Texas driver’s license in October 1980. At the time of the purchase, Hinckley was under psychiatric care.
Four days before the purchase, he attempted to board an airline flight in Nashville, Tennessee to New York City with three handguns and loose ammunition in a carry-on bag. On the same day, President Jimmy Carter was in Nashville and traveling to New York.
Hinckley was charged and tried for his attempted assassination of all four men. He was found not guilty by a jury in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. after interposing an Insanity defense.
In the uproar following the verdict, the jurors were compelled to testify before Congress about the reason they found him not guilty. This was unheard of up to that time.
At the time of the trial, Insanity was an “ordinary” defense. This meant that once the accused offered some evidence of a mental disease or defect, the burden of proof shifted to the prosecution to prove that he was sane beyond a reasonable doubt.
Congress promptly passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act which made the Insanity defense an “affirmative” defense and placed the burden on the defendant to prove a mental disease or defect by a preponderance of the evidence. A preponderance of the evidence means the greater weight of the evidence. Since the burden of proving this was “affirmatively” placed on the defendant, a jury, which determines the facts, was free to disbelieve the evidence no matter how much evidence was presented.
Most of the states followed suit with similar changes to the law and some, Montana, Idaho and Utah, abolished the defense altogether.
One would have thought that Congress would have moved just as quickly to remedy the flaws that allowed someone as disturbed as Hinckley to obtain a firearm.
Not so.
The Brady Handgun Violence Act, commonly known as the “Brady Bill” was not introduced in Congress until March 1991. It was never voted on and was re-introduced in 1993 when it passed and was signed by President Clinton becoming law in 1994, more than a decade after President Reagan, James Brady and the others were shot.
President Reagan said the Brady Bill “…can’t help but stop thousands of illegal gun purchases.”
While the law mandated the first background checks, it would not have prevented Hinckley from obtaining a firearm. The prohibition in the law applied to persons who had been previously legally committed to a mental institution or legally declared a mental defective which Hinckley, at the time he purchased the weapon, had not been.
The law had other loopholes and a three day window, in which the FBI could complete a background check, otherwise the gun sale had to be permitted. This particular time limit is still the law today and allowed Dylan Roof, who had drug charges pending, to obtain a handgun and murder nine people at Emmanuel African American Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina this year because the three days included a weekend.
As might be expected, the National Rifle Association (NRA) fought passage of the law from 1987 when it was first proposed and funded numerous unsuccessful court challenges to it.
In 1994 the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly referred to as the Federal Assault Weapons ban was enacted which prohibited the manufacture for civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms commonly called “assault weapons” and “large capacity” magazines.
The law was passed following a 1989 shooting in Stockton, California in which a teacher and thirty-four children were shot and five of the children died.
This law had a “sunset” provision which meant it automatically expired after ten years. It did so in 2004.
Since it expired, we have had the kind of assault weapons that had been banned, used in Columbine Colorado, Aurora, Colorado, Newtown, Connecticut, San Bernardino, California and Orlando, Florida and elsewhere with deadly results.
As we stop to consider the implications of Hinckley’s release from Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, we might also want to ponder what might have occurred if he had been able to obtain an assault rifle, the way other mass shooters are able to do today.