But the author of these words may surprise you.
The song was written by John W. Hinckley Jr., the man who shot President Ronald Reagan in Washington, DC 43 years ago.
And his actions and words show that the issue is guns, not politics.
Leaders across the nation have condemned the shooting of former President Donald Trump at a rally over the weekend as “political violence.”
“Violence has no place in our politics,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on X.
“Political violence has no place in our country,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement.
As was the case when Hinckley pulled the trigger, politics are not the topic here.
It is important to remember him and listen to him as the nation searches for a motive for the shooting that left one rally attendee dead and former President Donald Trump injured.
We are glued to the wall, wanting to know something about 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspect who was shot and killed by Secret Service agents moments after he allegedly fired six shots into a crowd at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, grazing Trump, wounding another, and killing a firefighter and his family who were present.
He is a registered Republican!
But wait, he donated $15 to a liberal PAC!
What? Does he have a criminal record? What are his political stances?
When Hinckley shot and killed President Reagan, his press secretary Jim Brady, and two members of the presidential guard in 1981, we were not yet familiar with this now-familiar pattern of attribution.
“Prosecutors did not suggest a motive for the shooting,” The Associated Press reported the day Hinckley was indicted in Washington.
Hinckley was not a rabid anti-Reagan, and this is not about Republican politics.
The previous year, he was arrested in Nashville with three guns in a suitcase, and investigators believe he was tailing former President Jimmy Carter.
In the end, his motives had nothing to do with Reaganomics, the Second Amendment, or the Republican Party: Hinckley was obsessed with actress Jodie Foster and wanted to impress her by impersonating her character in the film Taxi Driver.
How can the state make sense of that?
Vernon Jordan was quick to point out the problem: the guns.
Jordan, who was then president of the National Urban League, had been shot in the back the year before Hinckley’s shooting.
He knew it was time to speak out about America’s gun problem.
“This is an opportunity to do that,” he said at a news conference three days after the shooting. “The country is outraged by the shooting of the president and by what’s happening on the streets of America.”
He worried that the US would not regulate Saturday Night Specials or cheap handguns like the .22-caliber revolver that Hinckley bought for $47 at Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas and fired in Washington, D.C. These were major drivers of gun violence in the US at the time.
At the time, about 53 percent of American households owned guns, according to an analysis by the Violence Policy Center.
But we didn’t have such a strong, politicized gun culture.
“The mood in the country right now is not good,” Hinckley told ABC News shortly after his release from court-supervised release in 2022. “It’s not good that there are so many guns out there.”
Will this weekend’s shootings spur greater support for common-sense gun control? Probably not.
Brady dedicated his second life to gun control until his death in 2014. His death was ultimately ruled a slow-motion homicide due to the lasting effects of Hinckley’s bullet hitting his body.
His group took on the name of his last name, Brady, reminding us of a common element between the 1981 rallies and Trump’s: guns.
“Political violence has no place in this country,” said Chris Brown, president of Brady’s group.
“But we must also recognize that this horrific incident reflects the senseless gun violence that plagues our communities every day. Our response cannot end with condemning political violence,” Brown said.
“We must acknowledge that easy access to firearms enables both political and everyday violence,” she continued. “To truly address the political violence of this weekend, we must consider comprehensive gun reform that addresses the root cause: the proliferation of firearms in our society.”
