America has a long and rich history of assassinations of current and former presidents, as well as presidential candidates, dating back to the early 19th century.

The assassins managed to eliminate four of the 46 presidents of the United States. The most famous are the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and John Kennedy in 1963, as well as the names of the assassins, who are usually remembered by their middle names – John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. But bullets cut short the presidency of James Garfield in 1881, shot by Jarles Guiteau, as well as William McKinley, shot in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz. Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded in 1981, but doctors saved his life and his mandate.

In almost all cases, the assassins were men and used firearms. Not always their encroachment on the president's life was motivated to change the government in Washington and its policies. Several attackers did it because of a mental disorder, and some were declared "legally insane" and ended up in an appropriate institution. The vast majority of the assassins were liquidated, and the others were detained, tried and ended up in long-term slavery or on the gallows.

Abe Lincoln and JFK

Sixteenth President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday 1865 at Ford's Theater in Washington. He was shot at point blank range by actor John Wilkes Booth, who planned the assassination in collaboration with Confederate Secret Service figures. At the same time, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward were to be assassinated in their homes. After a 12-day manhunt, Booth was found and killed while trying to arrest him.

Kennedy, on the other hand, was killed while passing through Dallas in an open limousine, together with the first lady Jacqueline, the governor of Texas and his wife. In circumstances still unclear, JFK was mortally wounded by a bullet fired by ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of a library across from Dealey Plaza, where the presidential motorcade was passing. There is still no logical explanation as to how the fatal bullet ended up in the president's head or what the assassin's motives were. Two days after the assassination, Jack Ruby killed Oswald.

Twentieth President James Garfield was assassinated four months into his term, in July 1881. Approaching the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station, writer Charles Guiteau fired two bullets into him from a revolver. After two months in the hospital, Garfield died of a wound infection. Guiteau was arrested, tried and sentenced to the gallows. The sentence was carried out the following year, two days before the anniversary of the assassination.

William McKinley was killed at a Buffalo fair in September 1901 by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who fired two bullets from a revolver. The first bullet ricocheted off a medal on the president's chest, but the second ended up in his stomach, causing gangrene. McKinley died eight days after the assassination. Witnesses to the attack overpowered and severely beat Čolgoš, but he survived to be tried and sentenced to the electric chair. The sentence was carried out a month later.

Wounded Reagan

Ronald Reagan is the only active US president to have survived an assassination attempt. In it, in March 1981, in front of the Hilton Hotel in Washington, the assassin John Hinckley fired six bullets from a revolver. A bullet that ricocheted off the limousine ended up in Reagan's chest, breaking a rib and puncturing a lung, but doctors saved the president's life. He was released from the hospital 12 days after the assassination.

Hinckley claimed he wanted to kill the president "to impress actress Jodie Foster." He was declared mentally ill at trial and was kept in a psychiatric institution until September 2016 – 35 years after the assassination and 12 years after Reagan died of pneumonia.

Happy Roosevelt

Twice, fire was opened on former presidents who campaigned to return to office. One term after leaving office, Theodore Roosevelt campaigned as the Progressive Party's presidential candidate in 1912. Less than a month before the election, while at a rally in Milwaukee, John Schrank, a saloon owner from New York, shot him in the chest. Roosevelt's life was saved by the folded 50-page speech, as well as the frame of glasses he had in his inside coat pocket, which together tamed the bullet.

Schrank was promptly disarmed and subdued and saved from lynching on the spot by Roosevelt's appeal to the crowd not to injure him. The experienced hunter Roosevelt, however, aware that the bullet did not end in his body, finished his speech and accepted medical help only 84 minutes later.

- Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know if you realized that I was shot, but it takes more than that to kill a moose capitalist - said the president from the podium.

An X-ray showed that the bullet was lodged in the chest muscles, so doctors decided it was better to stay there than have it removed by surgery. Roosevelt carried the bullet in his chest until his death, but lost the election to the Democratic opponent Woodrow Wilson.

Trump, Obama and Biden

The second former president to be shot at is Donald Trump, also while campaigning for a new term. At a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at him with a rifle with a scope from barely 200 meters away. One of the eight bullets fired by Crooks ended up in Trump's right ear, but another fatally wounded a man at the rally. Two more people were wounded.

In the past two centuries, dozens of assassination attempts on presidents have been prevented, sometimes in the planning phase, and sometimes before the execution. In recent history, two assassination attempts on Jimmy Carter, one on George Bush Sr., two on his son, five on Bill Clinton and as many as 11 plans to kill Barack Obama have been discovered.

In September 2017, two plans to assassinate Donald Trump were discovered and prevented. Gregory Lee Linggang, 42, planned to kill the then-president during a visit to Mandan in North Dakota. He grabbed a forklift and planned to hit the presidential limousine with it, but failed. Two months later an Islamic State sympathizer, whose name has not been released, was arrested in Manila in the Philippines for plotting to kill Trump during his participation in the ASEAN summit. The incident was not made public until a year later.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, came closest to assassination last year, when a 19-year-old neo-Nazi from Chesterfield crashed into the barriers of the White House. The young sympathizer of the Third Reich stated that he "wanted to kill the president and seize power."

Two victims of suspected poisoning

Zachary Taylor and Warren Harding, the 12th and 23rd presidents of the United States, died in the line of duty under mysterious circumstances and may have been assassinations. Taylor died of infectious diarrhea in 1850, a few days after eating cherries and drinking milk at a Fourth of July celebration. After his death, rumors spread that he had been poisoned by Southern slave owners, but an analysis conducted in 4 found that Harding's remains contained no traces of lethal levels of arsenic.

Harding died of a sudden heart attack in 1923 after getting food poisoning while returning from a visit to Alaska. First Lady Florence did not give permission for an autopsy, which is why rumors spread that she may have poisoned his food, because he was not faithful to her husband.