evidence: Americans Know Political Violence All Too Well [...] Biden was surely right when he decried the shooting as "sick" and said, "Everybody, everybody must condemn it." Unfortunately, the historical record does not support the president’s assertion that "the idea that there’s political violence, or violence in America like this, is just unheard of." The reality is that political violence has been a feature of the American experiment for much of its 248 years. Four presidents have been shot and killed while in office—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. Another president, Ronald Reagan, was nearly killed by an assassin in 1981. President Gerald Ford was the target of two assassination attempts in September of 1975. Former US attorney general and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered after winning California’s 1968 Democratic presidential primary. Four years later, Alabama Governor George Wallace was shot—by a 21-year-old Milwaukeean—and left paralyzed, as he campaigned in Maryland for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.