From the Free Press archive: The nightmare is not over, shootings show

Editor's note: A week ago, the nation was stunned to watch an attempt to assassinate 2024 candidate and former President Donald Trump. Here is a look back at part of the Free Press' coverage of the attempt to assassinate sitting commander in chief, President Ronald Reagan. This article, in which the writer asks some of the same questions posed in the last week and in the aftermath of mass shootings across the country, published March 31, 1981.

WASHINGTON — We had thought, perhaps, that our long national nightmare was over.

It had been 5 years since a shot had been fired at a president and nearly a dozen years from that agonizing era between 1963 and 1968 when John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were slain.

The politics of violence, hatred and confrontation somehow had seemed to be abating. The Vietnam War was now only an agonizing memory from which to make films. In much of the country not everywhere racial violence and the threat of violence had seemed to be a memory of the past.

A smiling, pleasant president a man of obvious goodwill and good humor had come to the White House, declaring as he did in his Inaugural address that we Americans "have every right to dream heroic dreams."

BUT WITH brutal suddenness Monday afternoon we learned that the nightmare is not over. We are not out of it. There is no promise of a era of peacefulness to nurse our national wounds. All the old, haunting questions are certain to be raised again.

What is it in our society that breeds the madness of blind attempts at political assassination; men seeking to kill national leaders whom they do not even know?

Is there a cause? Or better, is there a cure?

Can a democratic society survive if men insist on resorting to violence, for whatever reason?

How can good men and women be expected to enter public life It they cannot be safe?

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THERE WILL BE those inevitable questions that became so familiar in the 1960s.

Who is the would-be killer, and why did he do it?

Was the president properly protected? How did a gunman get so close that he was able to fire a half-dozen shots?

Can any president be protected anymore?

How did the machinery of the government where lines of authority in times of crisis have been a matter of concern, even in the last week respond under pressure?

Why was the public misled by the White House staff in the first hour after the shooting, being told that President Reagan had not been hit?

AND IT IS inevitable that the national dispute over handguns will once again be raised. Does the easy availability of guns contribute to our national anguish?

In a way, these will be the easier questions. Some of them may even be answerable.

Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is what we are coming to.

It is a bleak prospect indeed if we are destined all our lives to witness these periodic televised scenes of horror, with screaming ambulances and police cars.

Some historians have said we are a nation bred to violence, with a tradition of violence. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated only a few miles from where Ronald Reagan was shot.

But it also is true that we have seen more attempts to kill presidents in our times than this nation had seen for generations.

President Reagan opened his inaugural address a little more than two months ago with the observation that "the orderly transfer of authority" in America, that "we accept as normal, is nothing less than a miracle" to many in the world. "Few of us stop to think," he said, "how unique we really are."

But there is nothing orderly about an attempted murder. This has become a recurring national nightmare, and it will be a great challenge to the American people to see if they can learn how to make it go away.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Coverage of attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan