The world woke up on Sunday morning to shocking images of a bloodied Donald Trump being dragged away by bodyguards from a rally in Pennsylvania.
Bullets, fired by what appears to have been a lone gunman from a nearby rooftop, had grazed the ear of the former president and now-presidential candidate, tragically killing one attendee and critically injuring at least two others.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican voter, has been identified as the shooter and was killed at the scene by US Secret Service operatives assigned to protect Trump.
Details of the would-be assassin’s motives remain scarce at this early stage in the investigation, as the spread of conspiracy theories and wild speculation continues to gather momentum on social media.
Leaders from around the world have voiced their shock and concern over this daunting apparent shift in the US political landscape, though Trump has vowed to press on with his campaign ahead of the election in November, with further public appearances remaining on schedule for next week.
In the meantime, he has joined a list of 13 other US presidents and candidates to have suffered assassination attempts – five of them fatal – over the past 160 years.
For those of us a little less au-fait with American political history, here’s a refresher.
The first US president to be the target of an assassination bid was Andrew Jackson while leaving the Capitol building in Washington, DC on the evening of January 30, 1835.
Walking down the steps, Jackson was accosted by an unemployed house painter, Richard Lawrence, who aimed a pistol at him.
The gun jammed, however, and Jackson proceeded to hit Lawrence with his walking stick.
Lawrence then produced a second pistol, which also misfired before he was subdued by Jackson’s bodyguards.
At trial, Lawrence was found not-guilty by reason of insanity and spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.
Having issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the country’s slave population during the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was shot on the evening of April 14, 1865, while attending a Washington, DC theatre with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.
Lincoln sustained a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, though he miraculously remained alive until the following morning.
The gunman, stage actor and Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth, was found some 12 days later hiding out in a barn in Virginia, where he was shot dead by Union soldiers.
Just 16 years later, James Garfield became the second US president to be assassinated, again in Washington, DC.
The hit was carried out by Charles Guiteau, an aspiring political opponent whom medical experts have since speculated may have suffered from a severe psychological condition, who’d hidden himself in the women’s waiting room at Sixth Street Station.
When Garfield walked past, Guiteau produced a revolver and shot the president twice, once in the back and arm.
It was another several weeks before Garfield eventually succumbed to his injuries, with Guiteau executed for his crime the following year.
After delivering a speech during an exposition in Buffalo, New York on June 13, 1901, William McKinley was shot twice in the chest at close range while shaking hands with the crowds.
Medical professionals initially assessed McKinley’s chances of recovery to be high, but he would die later that September after gangrene set in around his wounds.
Leon Czolgosz, a reclusive anarchist, was apprehended at the scene and later admitted to shooting McKinley. He was executed by electric chair the month after McKinley died.
Running for a return to the White House after previously serving two terms as president, Theodore Roosevelt was shot at while getting into a car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee on October 14, 1912.
It’s thought a bundle of folded papers and a glasses case concealed in his pocket may have saved the president’s life.
Much like Richard Lawrence, culprit John Schrank, a tavern owner, was found insane and spent the rest of his life in an institution.
Commonly known by his initials FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the third president to survive an attempt on his life.
Roosevelt managed to emerge unscathed from a February 1933 shooting in Miami that nevertheless claimed the life of Chicago Mayor, Anton Cermak.
Giuseppe Zangara, an unemployed bricklayer, was later convicted and sentenced to death for the shooting, though experts have since maintained he likely also suffered from mental health issues.
In the assassination attempt that took place closest to the White House, Harry S. Truman was staying at nearby Blair House when two gunmen broke in on November 1950.
Truman survived the ordeal unhurt, though a police officer and one of the assailants was killed in the ensuing shootout, with two other officers injured.
The surviving gunman, Puerto Rican militant Oscar Callazo, was subsequently sentenced to death, though Truman commuted his sentence to life in prison and he was eventually released by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
Arguably the most famous event in modern US political history after 9/11, John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while driving in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas.
The culprit, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested just hours after the assassination, only to be shot dead two days later by local nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
Conspiracy theories as to Oswald’s motives and the possibility of a ‘second gunman’ continue to circulate today.
Just five years later, John F. Kennedy’s brother Robert was killed outside a Los Angeles hotel, just moments after delivering a speech following his victory in the California primary.
An avowed Democrat, He had entertained high hopes of succeeding his brother as president of the United States, which were cut short by gunman Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old man.
Robert F. Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is presently challenging Donald Trump for the Republican Party nomination ahead of this year’s presidential election.
Another candidate for the Democratic nomination, George C. Wallace was shot on May 15, 1972 during a campaign event in Maryland.
The attempted hit on Wallace, a staunch segregationist, was carried out by Arthur Bremer, a mentally unstable career criminal who had also planned to assassinate President Richard Nixon.
Though Wallace survived the shooting, his injuries confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
The only US president known to have survived not one but two assassination attempts, Gerald Ford was targeted twice within the space of just a few weeks in 1975.
The first bid for his life came in September of that year, when Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, a member of the infamous Manson Family, pushed through a crowd in Sacramento and was apprehended attempting to draw a pistol on the president.
Another woman, Sara Jane Moore, confronted President Ford outside a hotel in San Francisco just 17 days later, firing a single shot that missed.
Both Fromme and Moore served decades in prison for their crimes, and remain the only women to have attempted to take a US president’s life.
Another assassination attempt that occurred in Washington, DC came in March 1981, when President Ronald Reagan was shot and injured by John Hinckley Jr after delivering a speech.
Reagan would go on to recover from his injuries, though his press secretary was left partly paralysed by the incident.
Hinckley, who was sent to a mental institution on grounds of insanity, was released two years ago.
During a trip to the Republic of Georgia, George W. Bush was almost assassinated when a hand grenade was tossed his way by one Vladimir Arutyunian.
An ethnically Armenian citizen of Georgia, Arutyunian had pro-Russian sympathies and was disillusioned by the presidency of pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili.
However, Bush was standing behind a bulletproof glass barrier, and in any case the grenade failed to detonate.
Arutyunian remains imprisoned in Georgia, where he is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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