Americans were once again confronted with political violence when a gunman attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month. The dinner is an annual event where politicians, reporters, and celebrities have gathered since 1921 in an uncomfortably cozy environment to temporarily forget their adversarial relations for an evening in black tie. With President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other senior administration officials gathered alongside some of the nation’s top journalists in a packed Washington Hilton ballroom, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen tried to force his way past the security checkpoint in what authorities have described as an assassination plot.
At a press conference that followed, Trump’s solution to the security threat was one he’s brought up before: the White House ballroom he wants to build where the East Wing once stood. “We need the ballroom,” the president said, with his instinctive ability for capitalizing on any situation to promote his own interests. The ballroom project, which he started unilaterally without following the standard procedures for historic buildings, has been tied up in federal courts. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey on, what most experts agree are baseless, charges of threatening the life of the president through an image of seashells he posted on Instagram.
Americans were once again confronted with political violence when a gunman attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month. The dinner is an annual event where politicians, reporters, and celebrities have gathered since 1921 in an uncomfortably cozy environment to temporarily forget their adversarial relations for an evening in black tie. With President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other senior administration officials gathered alongside some of the nation’s top journalists in a packed Washington Hilton ballroom, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen tried to force his way past the security checkpoint in what authorities have described as an assassination plot.
At a press conference that followed, Trump’s solution to the security threat was one he’s brought up before: the White House ballroom he wants to build where the East Wing once stood. “We need the ballroom,” the president said, with his instinctive ability for capitalizing on any situation to promote his own interests. The ballroom project, which he started unilaterally without following the standard procedures for historic buildings, has been tied up in federal courts. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey on, what most experts agree are baseless, charges of threatening the life of the president through an image of seashells he posted on Instagram.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress responded very differently to a wave of devastating assassinations that shook the nation throughout the decade. It had begun with the killing of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and continued with the murder of Malcolm X in February 1965. On April 4, 1968, an assassin shot Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee, and two months later, on June 5, Sirhan Sirhan killed New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, just minutes after Kennedy claimed victory in the California Democratic primary.
Johnson responded by pushing for gun control, the first serious effort on the matter since the 1930s. Unlike today, the political will existed to meet tragedy with law, and to at least attempt to confront the conditions that had allowed violence to take root.
The late 1960s were fractious times. The civil rights and anti-war movements had placed enormous pressure on the nation’s leaders to change course. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the sweeping programs of the Great Society, stood as a testament to how far grassroots activists had moved the country. By 1968, a majority of Americans had turned against the war in Vietnam, and a growing number of legislators supported the chorus of voices who were calling for an end to the fighting.
Americans had grown divided over race, culture, corruption, and foreign policy. In 1968, those divisions took a dark turn. After King’s death, urban unrest broke out in cities across the country, including Washington, D.C. Sen. Kennedy’s murder dealt a further blow: Many younger Americans lost faith that the Democratic Party could produce—or that the nation’s reactionary elements would allow—a new generation of leaders willing to break with the status quo. The chaos at the summer’s Democratic Convention in Chicago revealed how deep the fractures ran. Outside the convention hall, police clashed with anti-war protesters; inside, anti-war delegates battled party leadership. As the protesters chanted, the whole world was watching on television.
But Johnson refused to surrender to nihilism, even though he himself had stepped out of the presidential campaign that March.
The struggle for gun control had been underway for years. In 1961, Connecticut Sen. Thomas Dodd and his Senate Judiciary Committee colleagues initiated an investigation documenting how easily guns were being sold across state lines to felons and minors through mail, and at very low prices. Earlier federal efforts had addressed only narrow categories of weapons: In 1934, the National Firearms Act imposed limitations on weapons used by gangers, including short-barreled shotguns and machine guns. In 1938, the Federal Firearms Act established licensing requirements for dealers, prohibited interstate sales, and expanded the categories of people to whom sales were barred. The laws had limited effects. Narrow restrictions, inadequate enforcement, and plentiful loopholes allowed gun sales to continue over the next few decades while Congress lost its appetite for additional reform.
John F. Kennedy’s assassination transformed the political atmosphere. Lee Harvey Oswald had killed Kennedy with a rifle that he ordered from a mail-order advertisement in American Rifleman. In response, Dodd proposed legislation to ban mail-order purchases of handguns.
The National Rifle Association, whose leaders had initially expressed some tentative support for Dodd’s proposal, reversed course and bolstered the opposition. Dodd continued pushing the legislation, but to no avail. Dodd criticized the NRA as a “small but loud and well organized hard-core minority.” The issue continued to concern Johnson. In early 1968, the president called for gun restrictions during his State of the Union address, calling on Congress to prevent “mail order murder” through legislation.
In June, the assassinations of King and Kennedy finally forced open a policymaking window in Congress. Following King’s death, the senator took to the floor of the chamber to express his hope that “this brutal, senseless killing will shock the Congress into backing me in this fight to take the guns from the hands of assassins and murderers.”
Understanding how moments of crisis could create momentum for legislation that was otherwise stalled, the president ramped up his efforts. He sensed that congressional support for the legislation had also strengthened as a result of a Supreme Court decision—Haynes v. United States in January 1968—that called into question a key component of the 1934 legislation requiring firearms to be registered with the federal government.
Five days after Robert F. Kennedy was killed, Johnson signed an executive order creating a commission to look into violence targeting presidents and political figures, and asked its members to also examine the causes of violence in cities. On June 6, Johnson sent a letter to Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill saying that “in the name of sanity, in the name of safety—and in the name of an aroused nation,” Congress should “give America the Gun Control Law it needs.” Four days later, the president proposed banning the sale of mail-order, out-of-state rifles, bullets, and shotguns while barring minors from buying these weapons.
Members of Congress came under intense pressure from the National Rifle Association, which was becoming increasingly radical in its opposition. Sportsmen also lobbied in congressional districts against any restrictions.
Johnson was able to persuade Congress to insert restrictions on interstate handguns in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which Johnson signed into law on June 19. He did so in exchange for his support of a tough law and order bill. As the historian Elizabeth Hinton argues in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Johnson threw his support behind a vast expansion of the federal government’s role in local law enforcement, a shift that would fuel the dramatic growth of the carceral state in the decades that followed. Millions of federal dollars would pour into local law enforcement. The legislation also contained measures that granted the police unprecedented leeway when making decisions about wiretapping. Besides the immediate violence of 1968 in politics and cities, Johnson wanted to demonstrate to the electorate that he and the Democratic Party were tough on crime in the aftermath of the urban unrest in the summer of 1967 that took place in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit. Moreover, Johnson was genuinely concerned about safety for city residents.
Although Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield at first doubted that a separate gun control bill could make it through, he quickly saw that there was strong public demand. Time magazine aptly captured the national mood in the starkest of terms: “Forget the democratic processes, the judicial system and the talent for organization that have long been the distinctive marks of the U.S. Forget, too, the affluence … and the fundamental respect for law by most Americans. Remember, instead, the Gun.” Gallup polls from June found that over 85 percent of Americans supported a national registration system. (Support for gun control had already been growing, in part as a result of white Americans who were scared of the civil rights movement). Legislative offices were flooded with letters supporting legislation.
Once Mansfield was on board, the Senate focused on practical compromises that would make the legislation viable. Johnson was not pleased with how much his former colleagues cut down the gun control restrictions—his much-desired proposal for a national registration system was abandoned, as was federal control over the sale of shotguns and rifles—but concluded it was a compromise worth signing onto.
The Gun Control Act of 1968, which Johnson signed into law on Oct. 22, regulated the sale of firearms in interstate commerce and foreign commerce, restricted sales to various categories of persons, imposed limits on the importation of weapons, and expanded federal regulation over “destructive devices” like grenades. It also put limits on military weapon imports and required licensed dealers to follow stricter licensing measures. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division was given the responsibility of regulating the measures.
Johnson praised what Congress had done, despite what it had left out: “For the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country—more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing.” Johnson added that, “The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year.”
The legislation constituted the first successful firearms legislation in three decades.
In 2026, the different elements that allowed Allen to do what he did (laws that permitted him to obtain weapons; security failures that allowed him to get so close to the event; the breakdown of mental health services that left a deeply troubled individual undetected) will in all likelihood go unaddressed.
The 1968 legislation was limited and didn’t solve the United States’ problems. Violence continued, including two failed assassination attempts against President Gerald Ford in 1975. But at least elected officials had attempted to do something. There was a will to act and to try, an effort to pass legislation that could begin to address the problem and lay the groundwork for future reform.
Today, the response to gun violence rarely goes beyond thoughts and prayers, as well as opportunistic attacks on political opponents, who are blamed for inciting the acts of unhinged individuals. Trump, himself the target of this attack, has shown little interest in anything beyond using the moment to go after his enemies.
Until Congress acts to address the conditions that increase the likelihood of political violence, there will be no respite from the dangerous era the country has entered. Those who choose public service will have to weigh what should be a virtuous calling against the very real risks all elected officials now face.
