In September 2016, three and a half decades after he shot President Ronald Reagan in a deranged bid to impress the actress Jodie Foster — a crime for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity — John W. Hinckley Jr. was released from St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric in Washington, D.C. Mark O’Connell spoke with him recently, in light of the Trump assassination attempt, and wrote a lengthy profile about his conversations with Hinckley for The New York Times. The federal court that granted his release barred him from speaking with media and did not allow Hinckley, who was a songwriter for some years before the failed assassination attempt, to release any of his work, without the specific approval of the treatment team entrusted with his care. In 2022, not long after his mother died, the last of those restrictions were lifted.
The restrictions were intended to ensure that he neither courted nor was courted by the media and that his mental stability would not be threatened in the immediate aftermath of his release by widespread attention. But after 2022, Hinckley became a social-media figure of sorts. “For a majority of people who encountered his internet presence, Hinckley was an absurd and quintessentially American aberration: a guy who shot, and very nearly killed, the president and was somehow still alive to sing his songs about peace and love and redemption,” O’Connell writes. Then, after a young man took shots at former President Donald Trump, Hinckey posted: “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.”
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