Man who tried to assassinate Reagan says ‘violence is not the way to go’

John Hinckley Jr, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, has waded into the discourse around the recent attempted assassination of Donald Trump in a social media post seemingly disavowing his own past actions.

“Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance,” Hinckley wrote on X on Wednesday, sentiments that drew a welter of bemused and often ironic responses.

The post followed the attempt on the life of Trump, the former president who will later on Wednesday accept the Republican nomination as its 2024 candidate at the party’s national convention in Milwaukee , by a 20-year-old gunman at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.

Trump suffered a wound to his right ear in the shooting, while a rally-goer was killed and two others injured. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by security officers.

Hinckley, 69 – who was unconditionally released by a judge in 2022 after 41 years of living in custody or under supervision for trying to kill Reagan – did not immediately expand on his post.

He has previously expressed remorse for the assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton hotel on 31 March 1981, which left the then president seriously wounded and resulted in injuries to the White House press secretary, James Brady, that left him permanently paralysed.

A police officer and a Secret Service officer also suffered bullet wounds.

Since his release, Hinckley has tried to forge a new life as a folk musician and a painter. In March, he told a Connecticut radio station: “I stand for peace now.”

Hinckley was 25 and suffering from acute psychosis when he tried to assassinate Reagan, motivated by a desire the impress the actor Jodie Foster, whom he had become obsessed with after seeing her in Taxi Driver.

He was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 and ordered to stay in a psychiatric hospital. In 2016, a judge ordered that he could be released from psychiatric care with conditions attached as he was no longer considered a threat. The conditions were lifted unconditionally in 2022.