The forgotten assassination attempt of a sitting president

It is astounding how complacent Congress is these days around gun violence

Photo by René DeAnda on Unsplash

The shooting on July 13th at one of Donald Trump's rallies got me looking back on the attempted assassination of Bill Clinton in 1994. Most people haven’t even heard about it, but it happened right in front of the White House. Although nobody was hurt, the defendant, Francisco Martin Duran, was tried and sentenced to decades in prison.

I worked as a law clerk for the federal judge who oversaw the shooter’s federal trial. It was a pivotal experience early in my legal career.

But looking back today, what stuns me most is how different America was when it came to gun violence. In the wake of the Trump shooting, there’s no real energy in Congress to do anything about the country’s scourge of semi-automatic weapons. When President Ronald Reagan was shot, Congress passed an assault weapons ban and made it harder to claim insanity as a criminal defense, as John Hinckley successfully did in the case involving Reagan.

Even more disturbing is how accustomed we have all grown to it.

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From a legal perspective, the attempted assassination of former President Clinton was historic. I wrote about the forgotten lessons of the Clinton assassination attempt for The Hill.

What took place on October 29, 1994?

Almost thirty years ago, a 26-year-old man named Francisco Martin Duran was standing outside the White House on Pennsylvania Ave wearing a trench coat. He suddenly fired twenty-nine rounds from a semi-automatic rifle through the fence. One bullet shattered a window in the Press Briefing Room in the West Wing.