Reagan Shot 1981: Six Rounds, Dud Devastator Bullets and Haig in Control

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Nine days before he was shot, Ronald Reagan sat at Ford's Theatre looking at Lincoln's box and remarked that a determined person could still get close to a president. On March 30, 1981, the 70 year old Reagan, a few months into his first term, left the Washington Hilton for a 30 foot walk to his limousine without a bullet resistant vest, past an unscreened crowd behind a rope line 15 feet away. The gunman, driven by an erotomanic obsession with a teenage actress, had stalked Jimmy Carter the year before and been arrested in Nashville carrying concealed guns, but the FBI never flagged him to the Secret Service, and Reagan's schedule was printed in the newspaper.

In 1.7 seconds he fired six rounds from a .22 revolver, hitting the press secretary in the head, a police officer in the neck and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy in the chest, and the last shot ricocheted off the limousine into Reagan's left side near his heart. Only the first of the Devastator exploding bullets detonated. When Reagan coughed up frothy blood, the lead agent diverted the motorcade to George Washington University Hospital, where Reagan, having lost more than half his blood volume, walked in on his own before collapsing. At the White House, Alexander Haig declared he was in control, though the Secretary of State is fourth in line. Reagan later endorsed the Brady Bill.

• Reagan told Nancy he forgot to duck and wrote a nurse that he would rather be in Philadelphia.
• He told surgeons he hoped they were members of his party, and the lead surgeon, from the other party, said today everyone was.
• Officials argued with hospital staff over Reagan's cut away suit, whose wallet held the nuclear codes card known as the biscuit.
• Returning to Washington, George H.W. Bush refused to land on the South Lawn, saying only the president lands there.
• The insanity acquittal led several states and the federal government to tighten insanity defense rules.